Adviser Update Fall 2014

FALL 2014 24A Adviser Update News Fund Adviser Update n Who are we? The Dow Jones News Fund, a nonprofit foundation supported by the Dow Jones Foundation and other newspaper companies, encourages young people to consider journalism careers. n Adviser Update’s mission Adviser Update, a newsletter published by the Dow Jones News Fund for high school journalism teachers and publications advisers, is a free quarterly serving the inexperienced as well as the veteran. It will be the seminal free resource for these educators, a clearinghouse of practical, topical information. n Contacting the News Fund Mail: P.O. Box 300, Princeton, NJ 08543-0300 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] E-mail: [email protected] n News Fund staff Linda Shockley, managing director Diane Cohn, finance and administration n Contacting Adviser Update Please address all news items to George Taylor, Adviser Update editor. Mail: 200 North Lehigh St., Tamaqua, PA 18252 Phone: [phone] E-mail: [email protected] Telling great stories Waugaman Fund’s 2014 Teacher of the Year taying at school for six hours after the final bell had rung may seem like the worst kind of punishment, but to me, it represented freedom.   I was the editor in chief of my Houston, Texas, prep school newspaper, and that elective — for which we received no class credit — was the one place where I excelled. Math in its various incarnations wreaked havoc on my psyche; science was almost as bad and everything else was generally tolerable. But I felt at home in the newspaper office, and the week of “late nights” during which editors laid out and edited pages was something I looked forward to every month.   Kyle Parrish did not particularly look forward to late nights. Because editors’ parents rarely volunteered to chaperone us, that enviable responsibility fell largely upon Mr. Parrish, a first-year history teacher who had been given the newspaper faculty adviser gig because he’d just graduated from journalism school.   On more than a few occasions, Mr. Parrish, who truly cared about his students Students cover Ferguson Page 11A By Linda Shockley News Fund Managing Director Nine years later, I now understand . . . S https://www.Newsfund.org Scholastic Profile and the work we produced, had the audacity to infer or say outright that he really had not wanted to spend his Friday nights with us in the newspaper office on campus.     I relished those afterschool hours alongside my friends, working on something I loved, and I couldn’t comprehend that a man in his early 20s would have little desire to spend an entire week of evenings chaperoning high school students. But when his booming, radio-ready voice reminded us of the time, I would do my best to keep the editors focused on their pages and not on their bantering.   Nine years later, I now understand why Mr. Parrish reluctantly accepted the late-night component of his adviser duties. But back then, I was only just learning to consider the needs and wants of others — ironically, a practice that I began in that very high school newspaper office.   At the time, I thought my experiences as staff writer, features editor and eventually editor in chief mostly taught me to learn AP style, to keep deadlines and to be thorough, persistent and critical. It has taken me years to realize that the strongest journalists — the journalists I most admire — do and are all those things, but they are also empathetic. They listen. And they are humble.   As a high school student, I wasn’t mature or perceptive enough to shed my own self-interest. But looking back, I can see that through my work at the newspaper, I was slowly, unconsciously, learning that journalists forget their own needs, biases and egos in order to do good work.   I remember spending an hour interviewing a low-income woman whose house my class was painting for a service project, and how touched and humbled I was when she shed tears as we hugged at the end.   My parents had firmly told me that ADD/ADHD was a myth, but when I talked in length with students taking medications for the disorders as I worked on a story for our annual magazine issue, I learned the world is not black and white, and that what is preposterous to some is very real to others.   Then, when I became features editor, it was at first beyond my comprehension that some reporters chose to spend more time studying or playing a sport than they would dedicate to working on their articles … similarly to how I struggled to understand why Mr. Parrish was reluctant to spend so many after-school hours chaperoning student editors as they laid out the newspaper.   Now, nine years later, I wouldn’t presume to say I stand even close to those empathetic, humble journalists who listen more than they talk, whose egos disappear in their work, whom I so admire. I’m still learning and working to become the journalist I have always wanted to be, and I imagine this will be a never-ending process.   But I’m grateful that process even began, and I’m thankful to Mr. Parrish and the advisers who preceded him for helping me begin this wonderful journey. Chris Dunn has been a photojournalist at The York Daily Record/Sunday News in York, Pa., for three years. Once an aspiring reporter, she turned to news photography after a New Mexican hippie taught her photography in the desert the summer after she graduated from high school. She graduated with honors from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2010 and has interned at Washington Post Digital, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The York Dispatch. T o Chris Waugaman, a new journalism student conducting that first interview is like a baby learning to walk. He’s taught a lot of aspiring jour