Page 5- Student Review

Although this page is very amateur, I had so much fun with it.  I thought the mock newsroom was the best way to function a news, editing and design lab.  I truly felt like I was going to work every Friday.  I often say at the I wish we would have had more instruction at the beginning in regards to writing out articles for a paper we would create, but I still think that the hands on experience we got in creating our paper is truly some of the best learning experience I've gotten at the Grady College.  I thought all of the articles were a little text heavy and I hated chopping out bits and pieces of other people's story, but that is also part of the business.  I had to sit there and ask myself what was the most newsworthy information and why.  I guess it is like that old adage says, "desperate times call for desperate measures" and you learn when you have to.  I would have never been able to apply the concepts we learned in class if it wasn't for designing this one measly little page.  I never would have realized that design was something I could be interested in and talented at if I hadn't designed this page.  I wish I could do it next semester when hopefully there are some improvements such as the lab breaking up into different departments such as sports, entertainment, politics, community etc.  It would be fun to be a part of the photography crew (because at the beginning, we didn't know how important photos would be).  I really thought that was the biggest weakness of the lab--the fact that we were not told how serious our articles and photos would be taken to the point where more than half of us did not even provide photos.  I would say another weakness is that we all wrote such long articles, but I think that it turned out being a good thing because we all experienced feature writing and were then able to apply editing skills.  There was not actually much strategy to designing my page except to get as much information on the page as I could and still have some kind of natural text-slow and article break up to it.  I had to borrow the Cine picture from Google images and I am sure I did not cite it correctly so I feel ethically bad about that.  I actually wish I could have gone to Cine myself and taken a picture of college students interacting with the Theater since that is what the article was addressing.  I really like the bottom two articles, but they are very similar.  As an editor, I would have chosen to combine these two stories, take come more pictures of students interacting with younger children involved in these community outreach programs, interview some of the children, and I would also begin this story on the front page because I find it very important.  A newspaper that is called "The Student Review" should not put community outreach programs that are run by students, very effective in achieving their mission, and very beneficial to helping a college student's future (Resume wise) on page 5.  Well it can be put on page 5, but it should start as a front page headline.