Author Spotlight
Campbell Wood
Displayed on the screen is a value — “$5.00.” The students are expected to change it to proper AP style. For the majority of the kids in this class, this is the first time they’re learning about removing unnecessary zeroes and spelling out single-digit numbers. But for eight of them, it’s nothing new. They’re in the same place they were two years ago — intro to journalism — but this time in East’s room 413B.
Freshmen Caroline Gould, Caroline Wood, Phoenix Fisk, Elise Welch, Annie Jorgenson, Josie Gowen, Francesca Stamati and MJ Wolf are the first group of students — plus some enrolled next semester — to continue journalism at East after taking part in Indian Hill’s journalism program.
Intro to Journalism launched the fall of their seventh grade year — two years ago. Even though around 50 kids in their grade started out in middle school journalism, they are of the few who stuck with it.
“I think they just didn’t have an interest in it anymore,” Welch said. “I know a lot of them thought it was gonna be too much work — too much outside energy.”
They’re all fully aware of the stress of having in-depth interviews and the am-I-doing-this-right feeling that comes with journalism; and while they learned the fundamentals from middle school, they understand journalism is an expansive field that takes years to get an adequate comprehension of.
Despite already experiencing the stress of meeting deadlines and out-of-school hours in their middle school journalism class, they each had a love for journalism that made continuing in high school’s J-1 class worth it.
For Phoenix Fisk, it’s a window to a career in photography. She aspires to be the head photo editor for Hauberk, East’s yearbook, and maybe someday make a career of it. But for now, she takes photos in her free time using skills she’s learned from journalism class and summer camp. Her favorite thing to shoot? Sports.
“I like the action,” Fisk said. “When I first realized that sports [photos] are really fun to take and go through, and I can rewatch the game in photos, I feel like that’s why I wanted to do it.”
When they initially enrolled in middle school journalism, none of them expected leadership roles and the hands-on work a publication required. They just thought it would be a prerequisite to high school journalism.
But there’s one thing both the middle school and high school intro classes had in common — diligence.
“I kind of thought my workload [was] going to be like any other class, that this was just going to be kind of a basics of journalism,” Gould said. “And then, you know, in high school you’ll move on to actually doing stuff.”
They were challenged in middle school with making each layout unique and taking photos that offered a different perspective. The workload only increased in eighth grade, and they would often meet up at each other’s houses or the Prairie Village Starbucks to work. At that point, they had the added responsibility of training the seventh graders to fill their roles for the next year.
These skills of management and the experience from middle school carried over into the J-room once again — this time at East with Mr. Tate.
“We were just talking about the inverted triangle the other day [in J-1], and I still remember some of that [from middle school],” Gowen said. “The diversity of what [our middle school teacher] taught was helpful. She went over all the basics, so I definitely took from that.”
Even though writing headlines and news ledes are already second nature, they still find themselves tripping up over the pen tool in Adobe InDesign just like the rest of the class.
“We don’t really take notes in Mr. Tate’s class,” Gowen said. “Projects are really what matter and he definitely emphasizes that you need to know the basics, but what really matters is actually being able to display them effectively in a way that’s going to show him whether or not you can be on staff.”
The class is currently working through their feature and profile story unit, in which they’re required to write a full profile in increments. It’s a more constructed writing style than the 15-word captions for the middle school yearbook — but two years of experience with AP style and journalistic format has smoothed the transition to feature writing.
“I now know how to write journalistic stories compared to English literature,” Stamati said. “I feel like I can do some of the things that Tate’s asked me to change or fix, just because we’ve done it over and over again and the common mistakes that I’ve made keep coming up. Now when I’m reading a story [I’m] like, ‘Oh, I need to watch out for this and I need to make it interesting.’”
Francesca Stamati looks to join The Harbinger to focus on writing compelling ledes and breaking clichés. While her sister was the former head photo editor for Hauberk, she’s found her connection to journalism in writing.
The freshmen’s specialization in different fields led them to break the barriers of middle school journalism. In eighth grade, they published Indian Hills’s first newspaper — “The Knightly News.” And that was after they won Kansas Scholastic Press Association’s Award of Excellence for a middle school yearbook two years in a row.
The love and personal responsibility they’ve built for telling stories with words and photos have struck a passion in them — and it’s one they plan on continuing to pursue.
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