Weekly Reflection #1

This week was a huge learning experience for me.  Until this week I had never written an article specifically for a newspaper. I also had no experience designing a newspaper and had no idea how a paper was made. This week I spent a lot of time talking to my sponsor, who majored in journalism in college and currently runs a printing press in northern New Hampshire. I talked with him about both writing columns for a paper, and the time and effort it takes to get those articles printed into a newspaper. I learned about the stages of a printing press, and how these stages have changed due to recent technology and computers. I also gained an appreciation for the time and effort it takes to write even just one article, as each column requires a huge amount of time and research to complete. 

This week I also wrote my first column, a personal column on a student at Proctor who I both respect and consider a close friend. He is a student who represents Proctor with everything he does, and who a lot of people look up to. Yet to write an article on him, I couldn't just include my thoughts about him, I had to make it more objective and therefore had to interview him and other students about their thoughts on him.  I also had to learn a little more about his history and how he came to be the student athlete and role model he is at Proctor. 

This week I also drew up an outline of what I want my newspaper to look like. This gave me a better sense of just how much time and effort I'm going to need to spend on each article, because it helped me figure out how long each article needs to be. 

I really enjoyed what I was doing this week because I was learning so much new information and getting to spend a lot of my time researching things that actually really interested me. It was also nice being able to structure myself on my own, and having the opportunity to choose what I was writing about and how to approach the work. 

I have also began to read newspapers daily. This was something my sponsor suggested, as he told me it would broaden my perspective to read both local and global papers as well as school newspapers like Dartmouth college's newspaper. This definitely helped because I saw what appealed to me and what I think will appeal to my peers as well. There were certainly some surprises this week, as I had not expected that just one article would take me a full day to complete. I'd anticipated being able to complete two or three articles a day, so I'm glad I got an early start in writing the articles, because know I now I'm going to have to make sure to structure my time well enough to complete everything. 

This week I'm going to be spending some time at the printing press, taking pictures and getting a tour of the press. This will really help me to best understand how the press works, and to see first hand the entire process of printing a newspaper. I'm excited for this week to be a little more hands on, and look forward to completing more of my project.