Workshop teaches cooperation

Dexter Ott walks into a large museum full of eager children, who swarm the many activities awaiting them. Today, they can be a doctor, an astronaut, a farmer, or truck driver. They invent marvelous stories and go on many adventures. The scene is frantic, with parents running to chase their young ones, and employees impatiently waiting on their adolescent campers. Among the chaos, Dexter sees a story, his instinct helping to guide him in the quest. He recently discovered this inner journalist, a discovery he made at journalism camp.
The NHSPA journalism workshop took place on the UNL city campus this year, a four-day event with a diverse list of tracks for the high school students. Each day was filled with classroom time, hard work, and a little amount of sleep. The daily routine affected the campers with a grueling agenda to mold the reporters, photographers, writers, and editors into more successful journalists.
Dexter attended band camp in the past, but skipped it this year, journalism camp was happening at the same time, a new challenge for him.
“It’s [writing class] pointing out a lot of tiny things in my writing that I would never even think of fixing in there,” Dexter said. “And by fixing those I make the story a lot better and it’s really helped my writing overall.”
It gave a chance for Dexter to enter a new world of interviews, articles, and deadlines. Dexter worked with his peers from schools across the state of Nebraska on a level playing field. Journalistic writing class provided a chance to join together with more experienced journalists, instead of competing against them.
Editors, photographers, and writers were grouped and given the task of creating a story together, something Dexter was not accustomed to. It supplied him with a real world experience that he would some day face in the professional world. The converging of different styles of journalism for a main goal, to tell a story and find the perfect angle in which to tell it. As new media continues to develop, the cooperation of different journalistic techniques becomes necessary to tell a story in full detail, to get the best in-depth coverage.
“It’s actually been pretty cool getting to work with them,” Dexter said. “Like the photographers have been really great and they have been, of course, doing their jobs. The editor has been such a great guy like he’s gotten interviews set up; just an amazing help.”
This year, NHSPA introduced a new convergence to three different schools in hope that they could test the idea. This challenged them to strive for a merge of broadcast, writing, and photography in order to join a more modern era of journalism. To report the stories more efficiently. Dexter was not a part of this large convergence, but sees the importance of it for the future.
“Like, for a lot of papers you don’t have one specific job you have to do more things to and you also get to learn more too.” Dexter said. “It will also help you build more relationships with other people you’re working with.”