by the 2022 Journalism Class
Centerville’s Journalism class is now in its second year! Since then The Monthly Mustang has evolved into a strong student newspaper consisting of informative and opinionated pieces. The Monthly Mustang has also improved aesthetically over the years by going from Blogger to Wix and hopefully next year students will be creating their own website for the newspaper with their own unique domain. Expository writing and investigative research are two key skills that journalism students have flourished in this year. Furthermore, students have reported on a wide range of topics this year: entertainment, food, technology, sports, local news, world news, student life, etc.
Additionally, our newspaper held its second annual writing and art contest this year. Over 50 works of art, fiction, and poetry were critiqued by journalism students. For our final article of the school year, we decided to give readers a behind the scenes look at how we produce the widely popular Monthly Mustang; from how the articles are produced, published, and advertised to how we operate as a journalism team.
Publication Process:
How do the students of Journalism write and publish their articles? Well, this is how we do it. First off, we begin discussing topics we want to cover. Whether it's entertainment, sports, or food. Each group has their own topic which they chose to write about. Now, the rough draft begins. Writing our rough drafts takes about a week. When finished, we review each other's rough draft to find mistakes. Peer reviewing takes about a week as well. When we finish peer reviewing, we make the changes we need to our article. Once that is done, it's time to publish.
Our articles are posted onto our website made by Wix. Each group has one person with an account to publish on Wix. When we log in, we make a new blog post. From there, we copy the article onto there. We can’t copy and paste the images, so we have to download them. After downloading the images, we have to add it to the website. After all the images are uploaded, the articles should be ready to publish. To publish, we press a button which says “publish.” Once pressed, the article is now ready to be read.
Spreading the word:
We do many things to spread the word about our articles, like making posters or flyers. Firstly, our process begins with voting on what kind of ad we choose. It ranges from social media to creating a QR code. We usually start off by posting the article, then set up the advertisement plan. After that, we set the ads free. We usually do posters, flyers, put it in the announcements or The Mustang Round Up video. Our personal preference is making posters. Once the ads are free, we just hope it helps us to get views on our articles. Usually social media, the announcements, and The Mustang Round Up gets the most buzz. While the flyers and posters get the least buzz. Doing the advertisement plans is probably one of the easiest parts of making our articles and getting it going.
Annual Contest:
This year, we held our 2nd Annual Arts Contest. All Centerville students were given the chance to submit an art, fiction, or poetry piece, and have a shot at it being published in our school newspaper. We had over 50 pieces submitted, and the whole Journalism class critiqued them in just under a month.
The author of each piece was anonymous, so students had no prior bias. After evaluating a piece, students would give it a rating from one to four; 1 being that they didn’t want it published, and 4 being that they strongly wanted it published. Through this process, students narrowed it down to the top three winners of the contest.
The winning piece of the art contest was “Skulls and Roses,” created by Aashi Chowdhury. This beautiful sketch depicted the contrast between a skull and flourishing roses. Using shading techniques that made the piece realistic, this artist won the art contest.
The winning piece of the poetry contest, “Pandemic,” was written by Batul Raja. This piece discussed the COVID-19 lockdown, and the many losses and tragedies we have faced. However, the last stanza ended the poem on a happy note: “But this virus hasn’t been all bad / It’s taught people to take a stand / And when the world is in despair / It’s taught them to lend a helping hand.”
The winning piece of the fiction contest, “To Live with the Truth,” was written by Zoe Chiang. This literary piece told the story of 13-year old Louise Brendall, who learns that her best friend is moving away. After an unexpected event occurs, she regrets the fallout she had with her friend, but learns that she must move on and live her life.
The Journalism students held an award ceremony during flex time for all the winners. The celebration included snacks, a certificate rewarding their achievement, and mustang bucks. Each of the winners said a few words about their piece and explained the thought process behind what drove them to create it. Their names were announced in the Mustang Round-up as well as the daily announcements.
Highlights:
This news article is especially important since the entire class was working on this article which is very memorable. The June Issue which is this article was a last minute quick put together but the article is probably the best and will always be one of the best. The June issue was probably one of the easiest issues to make since everyone works on a different section which can help divide up the work. This article has so many great writers working on it and each section people write about will vary in size but each are equivalently the best. Also we covered the contest which was another great highlight. During our time in journalism we had a celebration for our art, fiction, and poetry winners of the second semester. Mr.Algarmi and his fifth period class started brainstorming ways to make our winners feel celebrated, we all agreed on snacks, juice, and balloons. Some kids from journalism came in at lunch to set up for the party during homeroom. We put up streamers, and even had a sign congratulating the winning students for when they walked through the door. We also got them crowns to put on their heads as Mr.Algarmi called them up to the front of the class to congratulate them. A funny thing happened though, Mr.Algarmi forgot to turn off the flex time sign up for his homeroom so we ended up having an unexpected guest for our party. But, we were able to have just enough snacks left for the unexpected kids! Speaking of having the contest party, all the groups which helped with the process of the art, fiction, and poetry came to celebrate with them. Group work is a big part of journalism, we all brainstorm and come together as a class and agree or disagree on topics for our articles. We can choose our groups but there are times where we have to be separated. But nonetheless we can still share ideas with each other and come up with a great article. Teamwork and communication is also a main part of group work. Communicating ideas and expressing what you think can be added or taken away from the article is very important to how the final product will turn out.
Behind the Brains:
From 7th to 8th grade, Centerville Junior High School is home to many journalism students, some of whom hope to continue their writing journeys beyond middle school. To further illustrate our journalism experiences, we interviewed 3 passionate Journalism students.
The first Journalism member we interviewed was Rishab Jain. When asked about whether Journalism has lived up to his expectations, he passionately replied: “Yeah, I think it has because at the beginning I thought we would just be writing articles, but we did a variety of things like a flextime celebration¨. Rishab finds journalism to be one of the most enjoyable classes to work at. He believes that everyone or everything deserves at least one chance, Rishab said, “Everyone should strive to give each other a chance.”
The second Journalism member we interviewed was Alex Jeung. In response to a question about what he enjoyed most about journalism, he answered: ¨The best part of journalism was the contest, and with the association, the contest party. We got to plan and celebrate at the party, and it was a fun way to reward the winners of our contest with a simple 25-minute activity.¨ Most Journalists in our class have shown great appreciation for the assignments we do in our downtime and are glad not to get busy work that most other electives assign.
The last Journalism member we interviewed was Aarav Dixit. In an interview with Aarav, a former student of Journalism, we asked him about how he felt about the course in retrospect, and how it compared to other electives. Aarav replied: "Yeah if you're into writing, it's better than most electives because you build writing skills and research skills, and it's still decently fun.".
Journalism students have been very proud of their work while taking the course, and they recommend others to join it.
Conclusion:
In Conclusion, the journalism class has worked hard publishing and advertising news articles this year. We truly take pride in ownership and we hope future journalism students continue on to cultivate the legacy of our school newspaper: The Monthly Mustang.
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