PALO ALTO, Calif. – Harker Journalism staff members attended speaker sessions with experienced professionals and fellow high school students in the journalism field to learn how to improve their own journalistic skills and publications at the Journalism Education Association (JEA) Northern California Media Day on Saturday.

Reporters visited several sessions over the course of the day, with topics ranging from how to apply journalism skills to any career to the nuances of international news coverage. 

J-ism Is Training for Anything

In her workshop, “J-ism Is Training for Anything,” Speaker Kathleen Neumeyer presented on how students can utilize journalism in their varied professional careers. 

She served as adviser of the Harvard-Westlake Chronicle for 24 years, and the publication won 13 Gold Crowns, five Pacemakers and varied other student journalism awards under her purview. After retiring from her position in 2015, she came across an article that a former student wrote titled “How my high school journalism teacher taught me to run a billion dollar company” in Fortune. Learning of her impact inspired her to reconnect with former students to explore how their high school journalism training impacted their current professions, a process she described in her book: “Advising the Chronicle: How I taught high school journalism students to run billion-dollar companies (and you can too).” 

“There’s never been a time where it’s more important for high school students to learn to evaluate and separate truth from fiction and separate what sources are trustworthy and which ones are not,” Neumeyer said. “Sweating the small stuff is really important in journalism, and it turns out that it’s really important in everything else.”

Freelance Columnist and Stanford Lecturer Dan Sneider and Eastside College Prep Journalism Advisor and former Mercury News Editor Elisabeth Rubenfien discussed how to resolve challenges related to the coverage of international events in high school journalism in their workshop “From Gaza to Donetsk.” 

Rubenfien encouraged writers to recognize the effect of their coverage of violence on readers, and to treat readers and sources with respect and consideration. She also noted that readers struggle with maintaining attention on an article and discussed strategies to retain readership. Discussing his own work as a foreign correspondent in Japan, India and the then-Soviet Union, Sneider narrowed in on the issue of balance in reporting, and how publications can maintain neutrality in controversial conflict. 

“Conflict is always going on, either conflict of a domestic nature or conflict of an international nature,” Sneider said. “The challenge is how do you make that conflict understandable, how do you make it relatable to people who are distant to that conflict and how do you deal with the complicated issues of balance.”

Video Journalism

In the Intro to Video Storytelling workshop, InFocus staff members Aneesh Tiwari and Claire Antonow talked about how to create engaging and informative video packages. InFocus serves as Palo Alto High School’s student broadcast TV station. 

Aneesh and Claire explained the process of producing video packages, focusing mainly on developing ideas, interviewing sources, filming different kinds of footage and editing cohesively. They noted the importance of prioritizing clarity while storytelling, especially through the video medium.

“You want to keep it more casual,” Aneesh said. “When I’m reading an article, if I don’t really understand a sentence, I can just go back. But if I’m watching the news, I’m probably not going to be rewinding 10 seconds to hear again what they say. You really want to keep it clear and concise and digestible.”

Upping Your Sports Game

Grace Gormley, an editor-in-chief of Viking, Palo Alto High School’s sports-only publication, broke down Viking’s approach to sports coverage. Founded in 2008, Viking stands as the nation’s only high school sports magazine. 

Apart from “beats,” or brief game recaps of all home games, Gormley divided Viking’s coverage into three categories: community-focused, which promotes engagement, problem, which tends to tie sports into larger issues, and news content. Gormley also emphasized the importance of encouraging sports photography across publications. 

“It’s interesting to think about what aspects of athletics we don’t cover in other publications at [Palo Alto High School],” Gormley said. “Viking does the work of going a bit deeper into that.”

Co-Arts & Entertainment/Lifestyle Editor Alison Yang (11) attended Gormley’s session. Alison commented on how helpful it is to see inside another publication and take inspiration from their process. 

“My favorite part of the session was when she went in-depth about the different types of articles in Viking,” Alison said. “It was interesting to see how they differentiated them and to see their process from ideation to interviews to putting [articles] together in layout. I’ll definitely be keeping that in mind going forward.”