Poynter Online presents Poynter High, bringing you story ideas, tips and strategies to help you serve your school communities through your journalism.
I run the High School Journalism Program at The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists overlooking Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg, Fla. Poynter created this virtual place for scholastic journalists to gather and to learn from each other and from the pros.
If you want to come to Poynter for real, you need to know about two programs we offer high school students:
1) Every February, 200 students and teachers from across Florida come to Poynter for the Florida High School Writers Workshop. Registration opens Jan. 2 each year, and we fill up, so if you�re interested, check here for a registration form and other details. The next workshop will be in February 2008.
2) Each spring, I select 30 students within driving distance of Poynter for a yearlong program for students seriously interested in journalism. These students spend two weeks at Poynter in June then return for workshops one evening a month during the school year. Check here for details and an application. The deadline to apply for the 2007-8 program is March 31, 2007.
The winners of the Florida High School Journalist of the Year and Florida�s Emerging Young Journalist awards also spend a day at Poynter. Be named the National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year and attend an entire seminar here. But, well, I suppose you can�t count on those.
So let me tell you more about what we�re trying to do at Poynter High.
A bit of bling: Poynter�s credentials
Poynter High connects you to Poynter and its faculty. The Poynter Institute conducts about 50 seminars a year for professional journalists from around the world. Our faculty includes former TV news directors in Nashville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Iowa, the former managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the former executive editor of The Sacramento Bee, the photo editor for three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects at Newsday and a writing coach who wrote his doctoral thesis on Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” The 17 of us on the faculty have been writers, photojournalists, reporters, visual editors and anchors from Spokane, Wash., to Sarasota, Fla. We continue to publish on Poynter Online, as contributors to the St. Petersburg Times, National Public Radio and other meda, as book authors and editors and, in one case, twice in one year, as a guest on “Oprah.”
We�ll also bring you guidance from other journalism training sites, such as No Train, No Gain and the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ High School Journalism website. We�ll show you student award winners so you can learn from them. We�ll make sure you don�t miss a great story idea from Al�s Morning Meeting, a Poynter Online column filled with tips and links on covering the day�s news. And we’ll provide links to courses on NewsU, Poynter’s online learning group.
How this site can help you
My goal is simple. I hope to make it easy for you to tap into the expertise of professional journalists so that their words and vision might inspire you. I want to help you elevate the work you do in your school, whether in print, broadcast or online. I want to give you a professional perspective on the craft and values of journalism, interviewing and reporting, design and photojournalism, writing and editing, ethics and leadership.
Helping me is Jacky Hicks, who worked on her high school newspaper, the Seminole (Fla.) Warhawk, and is a student at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. She�ll write much of the content for Poynter High, trying to keep the text short and the ideas relevant to your world. Jeremy Gilbert from the Poynter Online staff designed the site in a way that we hope you�ll find easy to navigate and a pleasure to use.
How you can help
Interact with us. We’ve created a special place for this: Your Turn. Comment on stories. If you tried something and it worked (or not), share your experience. Ask a question. Link to something on your newspaper�s site. Get involved and help us focus Poynter High on what matters. We’ll use that column to talk about work we like, but we really want to hear from you. You�ll keep the site alive.
So get back to Poynter High�s homepage. Look around. Register your name and e-mail (you can tell us not to send you any e-mails in return if you want) so you can participate in this virtual community, a gathering of student journalists and the professionals who want to help them on their way.
Wendy Weyen Wallace believes in scholastic journalism because she knows how rewarding and life-changing it can be. She was editor of her high school newspaper, The Kirkwood (Mo.) Call, and college paper, the Indiana Daily Student, before working as a reporter, copy editor and marketing manager at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. She landed this great gig at Poynter in 2004.
