Here are some of the things I learned in Journalism this year.
Technical Editor
My job this year was to not only write articles, but to be a technical editor too. A technical editor is someone who dumps articles on to the page plans the page makers have already created. I thought this job would be easy, but it was actually very stressful. A lot of peoples' articles are too short and even worse, too long. You have to adjust the page and the article until it perfectly fits in the column. You also have to retrieve pictures from others to dump on the page and add captions along with headlines. It becomes extremely stressful when people don't have their stuff ready when you have to get you page done, like pictures or even an article. The page to the left is my Opinions Page I created for the May Issue. It uses some advanced techniques I learned after much practice with Adobe Page Maker, including shading, rounded corners, and nicely edited pictures. It is a huge improvement from my October Issue Sports Page, which had no extra pictures other then faces in the quad.
I dumped the Sports Page in the April Issue. This shows improvement form last issue.
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I dumped the Sports Page in the October Issue. Look how bad it is compared to the May issue.
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I dumped both Features Pages in the November Issue. That was a lot of work! It was my first time doing double pages.
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I dumped both Features Pages in the December Issue.This one was better built than the last one.
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Dumped the Sports Page in the March Issue. The pictures were nice and so were the columns.
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Did the Sports Page in the February Issue. Showed my ability to fit big articles into small columns.
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Did the News Page in the April Fools' Issue. That was fun! It was the most relaxing page I have ever dumped.
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Did the Front News Page in the January Issue. Quickest double page I've ever completed.
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Did the Back News Page in the January Issue. Quickest double page I've ever completed.
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Physical Education Beat
Before I realized I was not supposed to have a beat as a technical editor, I was the PE beat. Though the only news I heard from the PE teacher was that they expanded run zones and there was a community run coming up that month, it was fun interviewing the teachers, even if it was for nothing.
Typing Skills
This was the typing test from the first trimester, which I easily passed. I've noticed as the year continued on, I had become faster and faster at typing. This is because of all the work I've done by typing. I will continue working on getting faster with less and less typos.