Harker journalism attends JEA/NSPA conference in San Francisco
April 18, 2018
Fourteen student journalists from Harker attended the event to practice with their peers and learn important journalistic skills from experienced educators.
Harker Aquila received its award for becoming a Pacemaker Finalist during the convention, and the Winged Post took fifth place in Best of Show.
During the opening ceremony, student journalists of the Marjory-Stoneman Douglas high school received the first-ever Courage and Commitment award for their dedicated coverage of the tragedy at their school in spite of the traumatic nature of the event.
The event began with three student writers reciting poetry about the importance of journalism and cultural identity.
Keynote speakers San Francisco Chronicle reporter Kevin Fagan and retired Chronicle photographer Brant Ward followed the poets, talking about their work together to cover the plight of the homeless from 2003 to 2006.
They then showed photos and told the stories of the subjects behind the photos, beginning by explaining how they came to document the homeless.
“In 2003, the [San Francisco] Chronicle went through a little change,” Ward said. “The first corporation which had long wanted to buy the paper bought it, and they brought on this hotshot editor from the Philadelphia Inquirer, [and] he brought his family to San Francisco.”
The editor, Robert Jon Rosenthal, took a wrong turn on the way to their new home and drove through the Tenderloin area, a region of San Francisco noted both for its abundance of homeless people and its efforts to house them, compared the area to the setting of movies made by Italian film director Federico Fellini, who incorporated colorful characters to add interest to his films.
Rosenthal’s experiences with the Tenderloin area inspired him to launch a story on the homeless of San Francisco. He asked for a reporter and a photographer to cover the story, and Fagan and Ward volunteered.
Little did they know that what initially seemed like a small assignment would turn into an in-depth feature piece on a prevailing problem on a global scale.
“Put ‘em out there as long as it takes to get the job done, to figure out why there are so many homeless people,” Rosenthal said, according to Fagan.
Fagan and Ward’s prior experience covering massacres, breaking news and the homeless lead them to be interested in the story. From the beginning of the assignment, Fagan and Ward decided to focus on the larger picture rather than emphasizing the sentimentality of the housing crisis.
“The first day that we were out, Brant and I looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we don’t want to just do a bunch of sad-sack stories, we want to figure out how to fix it – not just why they’re there, but how to fix it’,” Fagan said. “That’s been the driving motivation for us ever since.”
They then presented a slideshow of the photos of different homeless families and friend groups they documented for years with music playing in the background.
“We, at great expense, brought in some music, and we do this because we both start crying if we go at this too much,” Ward said.
Fagan and Ward then discussed the people they interviewed and photographed. One person that particularly touched Fagan and Ward was Jill, a woman whose addiction to heroin contributed to her circumstances on the streets.
“It tears you apart unless you channel it somehow, and for a lot of us it’s through our writing, for some of you it’s through your photography, for me I also do some songwriting, and I’d written this song just a little while before, and I thought it felt perfectly about how I felt about Jill,” Fagan said.
The duo then closed the ceremony by performing the song and telling the students about how journalists connect with the people they interview.
“I would hope for each one of you, if you do your journalism with real heart and you try as hard as you can, you put in 150 percent, that you’re going to feel that way about the people you write about because it’s really important,” Ward said. “They need your voices, they need someone to pay attention.”
The following two days, the student journalists from Harker attended various sessions at the conference that discussed a broad range of topics from applications to design to covering tragedies at school. They also met other student journalists from both nearby and abroad, shared ideas and gave one another advice.
Prior to the start of the convention, students tasted chocolate in various stages of production at Dandelion Chocolate, visited the Walt Disney Museum at the Presidio, a former military base, took a walk near the Golden Gate bridge and ate Spanish-influenced California cuisine for dinner at the Commissary.
Prior to the opening ceremony, the group took a ferry to Sausalito, where they spent the day taking pictures and video to be used in their coverage of the trip.
The next JEA/NSPA conference will be in Chicago from Nov. 1 to Nov. 4 this year and the next spring convention will be held in 2019 in Anaheim from April 25 to April 28.