By ANASTASIA ANTONOVA
“Show not tell, probably the two most important words for journalists and storytell- ers,” Jack Kennedy, president of Journalism Education As- sociation, stated in the intro- duction to his lecture “Story Telling: The Heart of What We Do.”
He continued by telling sto- ries ranging from six words to 300, explaining how read- ers digest words at about 200 words a minute, and how great writers write great stories by breaking the rules. Kennedy’s session was just one of hundreds that student journalists attended during the National Journalism Education Spring National Convention held in Anaheim in April.
After the hour in Kennedy’s session, that for some seemed more like a minute, the 4,000 yearbook and journalism kids piled out of the rooms and frantically navigated the crowded hallways looking for their next class, praying that there would still be a seat left for them.
The class capacities ranged from 20 to 300 students, so everyone had to make a game plan and hope to get a seat.
Design sessions, which were especially popular, had long waiting lines and few seats. Editors, writers, and photographers shuffled around the Marriott in Anaheim for four days.
In the late afternoons everybody crawled back into his or her room to catch up on sleep or study.
The Laguna Blanca jour- nalism and yearbook staff in- cluded of sophomores Anasta- sia Antonova, Caitlin Connor, Daria Etezadi, Brendon Nylen, Zoe Serbin, juniors Morgan Raith and McKenzie Scar- borough, and seniors Caro-
lina Beltran, Elliot Serbin, and Amanda Schulenberg.
The group took classes including new styles for year- book and newspaper design, journalism and news, journalism and business, and blog and website design.
Amanda Schulenberg describes classes on organization, “We learned a lot from the organizational classes they offered, and we will try to im- plement the skills we learned from them.”
The Laguna group joined the assembled 4,000 students attending the keynote speaker address.
The keynote speakers were sisters Laura and Lisa Ling. They described their lifechanging and dangerous investigative journalism experienc- es: on sex trafficking in the US, the war in Afghanistan, and the story of how Laura was held in one of North Korea’s labor camps.
Attending the conference filled everyone with ideas on how to make publications better.
