For the Journalism Project, sophomores created their own article and published them on to our Animas High School newspaper digital portfolio that the editorial team made. On the digital portfolio, the editorial team sectioned our articles into opinions, news, science/tech, and art/entertainment as if it was a real newspaper. To have insight about how to write a newspaper article, we did several activities in class to help us understand. For one, as starters in class, we read new articles in newspapers and on websites everyday. By doing this, it teaches us how to structure our articles and what to write about that’s relevant and irrelevant. Other tasks we accomplished, was reading and watching videos about how to manage our bias, and learned about what’s the role of the media. After completing these tasks, we had more information on how to write an article and began to brainstorm on what we wanted to write about.
As we learned about journalism, I processed reading newspapers in a whole new understanding. Reading through articles, I check to see if their managing their bias, if their sources are reliable and more. I’m really glad we learned about this topic in Humanities, because this helps me prepare for writing articles in the future. Who knows, I may become a journalist now and write for the New York Times, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. It was a very interesting project and I got a lot out of it. Journalism is a very different structure than essays and I am ecstatic that we had an opportunity to learn about it.
My journalistic skills improved majorly as we developed our articles. As I said, journalism is a different format than essays, because you have mini paragraphs, instead of very long ones. This challenged me, because it was difficult to break your long paragraphs into shorter ones. I, also grew as a writer by getting a chance to interview with people about my topic. This made my information very reliable and helped me construct important questions I could use in my article. Next time, I would like to be more professional when I write, and manage my bias a little better. I am genuinely proud of my article though, because I put a lot of hard work into it and made it personal. I would say it’s beautiful work.