FAHS Sends Writers, Reporters to PSPA Convention

Recently, a few lucky students–including me–had the chance to participate in The Pennsylvania School Press Association (PSPA) annual convention. What the convention boiled down to was a number of seminars that the students could choose attend depending on their specific fields of study. For example, students from Tiger Tale would participate in any seminar pertaining to yearbook composition.

Sitting in on these seminars was not only educational but also quite interesting–which isn’t always par-for-the-course in lecturing situations.

The 9:00 seminar brought Using Ethical Journalism to Gain Editorial Freedom to the attention of many aspiring journalists. In this seminar, the lecturer discussed the different approaches students can take to talk to administration about “sensitive topics” such as sexuality. The session allowed students to relate similar problems they have in their writing when they get their articles approved.

In the next session, which began at 9:55, Digital Writing was the topic at hand. For this one, the topic of the online newspaper was discussed and how to have a more efficient online newspaper. It gave insight on using different online sites to interact better with newspaper endeavors.

The session beginning at 10:50 brought the topic Journalism to Social Media to the table, which is a very controversial issue for many school districts. The session gave insight on other websites to use to get your online newspaper known, such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, Storify, and many more. It informed reporters that the future is here in the technological world that now seems to revolve around us.

The fourth and final session was entitled Narrative Writing Brings Stories to Life. In this session, students were able to learn how to be creative with the approaches they take to writing different articles, using the senses and different point-of-views to give the article an interesting twist.