Columbia Scholastic Press Association

Newspaper Reporting & Writing (Group #1)

This sequence is designed to have students leave the Columbia campus with their practical journalism skills enhanced and their journalistic judgment matured.

Students will learn:

• how to write informative, interesting and entertaining news and feature articles 
• techniques of reporting, interviewing and writing, including gathering information through the Web and conducting email interviews 
• how to fashion sentences, paragraphs and quotes for accuracy and readability 
• how journalistic writing can be creative
• how to write, rewrite and copyedit articles for correctness, completeness, structure and style
• how to keep one’s own opinions and feelings out of news and feature articles yet still convey the emotions and humanity of an event, issue or situation 
• how to see news and feature story possibilities everywhere, in and out of school
• how to write articles that affect readers' lives, attitudes, emotions and thinking 
• how to think like a journalist
• how to deal with censorship and criticism of the school paper

Assignments will include:

• writing a news article and a feature article; covering a press conference 
• an article based on a speech; an article about someone on the Columbia campus 
• an in-depth interview with an individual who has a significant story to tell
• exercises in journalistic writing that is clear, accurate, concise and graceful
• analyzing and evaluating school newspapers
• exercises in descriptive writing
• using humor as an element in news and feature writing
• recognizing editorializing in news and features
• copyediting your own and classmates' writing

Group Instructor

Bob Greenman has conducted CSPA journalism convention sessions and summer workshops, and presented sessions at JEA national conventions and many state conferences. His main goal, whether in a one-hour session or a two week workshop, is to help journalism students and teachers not only to develop journalism skills but to think like professionals.

Bob, a former journalism teacher and newspaper adviser, is the author of The Adviser's Companion, a handbook for high school newspaper advisers, published by CSPA, and, Using The New York Times as Your Journalism Textbook, published by The New York Times’s newspaper in education program. He has taught at CSPA summer workshops and conventions, and at JEA and state conventions.

Outside of scholastic journalism, Bob has authored or co-authored the vocabulary enrichment books, Words That Make a Difference and More Words That Make a Difference, based on the words and writing of The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly magazine.

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