KPLU Local News
(2010-06-08)
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Arrow co-editors Brendan Dowd and Ajane Burnley (right) work with fellow students on a recent edition.
Gary Davis/KPLU photo.
(KPLU) - It's a recent Friday afternoon and its production day in the newsroom of Arrow, Renton High School's revived student paper. Two dozen kids are settling in clusters around computer screens as they move into paste-up' for the latest issue of the two-year old paper.
It's also the day before the big state high school newspaper competition, and co-editor Ajane Burnley predicts it may be a long night. "I just hope that every issue turns out okay. Sometimes it's real scary. For this issue that we're working on, the first deadline no one turned anything in," says Burnley, a senior.
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| Front cover of a recent Arrow |
"There are 30 of them, and they are each meant to do two things each production cycle. And if there's thirty, and each are supposed to do two, we should've have gotten sixty," says Smith, now in his second year at Renton. "We got, I think, ten. We had to have a reality check, and it was not a fun day."
Those types of days are the exceptions. Most times students do make their deadlines, Smith says, and learn something valuable in the process.
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Senior Onna Giddens says she's taking many lessons from journalism class. "If you don't know how to manage your time you will be in paste-up working on your page until the last minute, so it taught me a lot about time management. It taught me about being reliable because you have to be able to do something for another person if you want them to do it back for you."
Kenneth Orejudos wraps up his experiences another way. "This year was kind of like me, kind of growing up," he says. He and a group of friends got a little bored early in the school year and decided to do some artwork - in the form of graffiti.
"We would go out on little runs, and we'd tag up the bathrooms. After about a week or so, we started to get a little too comfortable. That's how we were caught by the video camera," Orejudos adds.
He was offered the chance to channel his creativity through Arrow's Poetry Slam page. Orejudos calls it his redemption, a chance to offer something back to his class. "To be honest I never thought I'd be close to anyone here. It just helps out, that whenever I have a bad day, I just look forward to journalism class."
Hearing about that experience puts a smile on the face of Kathy Schrier, the executive director of the Washington Journalism Education Association in Seattle. Schrier says Orejudos' story underscores the importance of the student newspaper as part of the mix of educational offerings. "It's a great way to help kids who are looking for an outlet to focus their energy and talents in a positive direction."
Schrier says Renton is one of three Puget Sound area high schools to recently revive their newspapers. The others are Sehome High School in Bellingham and Seattle's Cleveland High. They are among the 40 percent of state high schools that have student papers. Schrier would like to see those numbers increase. She calls the student paper's rebirth at even a few schools a welcome sign.'
During the past decade, she says, the printed publications were giving way to online productions. It was cheaper. Schrier says students don't engage in the same way they do with a printed paper.
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| Arts page of the Arrow newspaper |
Back at Renton High, junior Irene Muller says her age group has been miscast at the electronic generation.' Muller says their passion is in having the tools in hand to do things for themselves. "The older generation has almost given up on print. And they've said, You know what? Fine, you are coming in with MySpace and Facebook and Twitter and the written word is dying. The typed word is just beating it senseless," Muller says. "But, I feel like our generation can come in and say, Look at this! No one is doing it (print) anymore!' We can turn it into something new."
Instructor Derek Smith says the paper's rebirth has given his students an outlet they don't otherwise find at school.
"They put out a ton of energy and ton of effort, and they'll occasionally cry. We'll be really happy and we'll cry together," says Smith. "But I think part of the reason they are willing to put forth all of that energy is because in the end you print two thousand copies of their homework and that's really powerful. People read it!"
You might think such powerful experiences would mean these students are considering journalism careers. Co-editor Ajane Burnley will. She plans on majoring in communications at the University of the Pacific next year. But she is one of a very few.
Onna Giddens wants to major in environmental science. "But the skills I'll take from journalism are my writing skills, talking skills. I'll be able to take everything I've learned and put it into what I want to do in the future, no matter what I do. They are life skills I learned here," says Giddens, who hopes to attend Green River Community College next fall.
On this day, production wrapped up with the last mouse click near midnight, sending the paper to the publisher. At competitions this spring, Renton's Arrow picked up five awards in state and national contests. Gary Davis, KPLU News, at Renton High School.
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