Leaving a Paw Print

A new class being offered this year at West Morris Central is the journalism class. We are creating a school newspaper from the ground up because there has not been one at our school for a while. The name of the new newspaper is The West Morris Central Paw Print.

In class, we split up into 4 main groups - features, sports, news, and photo. Every section has an editor and a staff. There are also 2 senior editors and 1 junior editor. I was chosen to be the features editor and am responsible for assigning stories to my staff, reviewing everything they write, helping with the layout, and also writing other stories. We are working on issue 1 right now. Every student has at least one article to write for issue 1.

There is also an extracurricular club associated with the class. Club members also write stories but are not required to be in the class. It is exciting and challenging to create a newspaper from scratch.

On Monday, our editors and some staff members went on a field trip to Rutgers for the Garden State Scholastic Press Association’s Fall Press Day. Journalism and yearbook students from over 60 New Jersey schools came to hear speakers give presentation on the world of journalism. There were many presentations that students could choose to go to from headline writing to covering controversial issues to layout and editing tips.

There was a keynote speaker there as well - Thomas Franklin. He is a photojournalist and was  the photographer responsible for taking the famous picture of the three firefighters raising the flag at ground zero on September 11, 2001. He gave a presentation on photojournalism and his experiences, especially his experience on September 11. His presentation, along with all the others, was very interesting.

All of the students that I spoke to that day learned at least one thing that they are planning on using in their newspaper and everyone seemed to enjoy the day. I definitely learned a lot and was inspired by the speakers. Hopefully, our school newspaper will continue next year and the journalism class will get to go to the conference again.