Things I learned from J1*

Last week I wrote about why I'm not a journalist, or interested in pursuing journalism. That being said, Journalism 1 was one of my favorite college courses, and I earned the crap out of that A. So here are some things I learned, in no particular order.



1. Composing on a keyboard. Some people say the ideas come better on ink but the bottom line is it’s faster, saves recopying time, and comes out neater. I may not always compose like this, but it’s good to have the option.

Besides actual composing, you should learn to type. Definitely one of the most useful things I ever did. I don’t care how fast you hunt and peck you still need to look at the keyboard. Being able to type 55 wpm is a plus in any job.



2. Editing. As soon as you write your little article in class, you’ve got to chop it up and figure out how to do it better. Seeing what you write not as your baby that’s perfect but as a construction that you can fiddle around with and make better is something we all have to learn. In journalism, you learn fast.



3. Caffeine. My J1 class was early in the morning. Actual quote from my professor: "You guys don't know what it's like to sit up here and look at you. It’s like a casualty ward." Needless to say everyone came to class with something caffeinated.

I wish.

4. Just the facts. If you’ve ever paid attention to newspaper articles, you’ve noticed that you can read the first paragraph and get a summary of the whole thing. The rest is just details, with each paragraph become progressively less important. It’s called the inverted pyramid.

We actually spent weeks writing those little one sentence paragraphs, called ledes. Our professor would give us all the facts, details, quotes and names to write an entire article, and we had to sift through and par the story down to one sentence.

It’s a good skill to be able to narrow a story down to the who what where when why. One of my college friends, Rachel, actually took an hour to tell the story of how and why she changed dorms. In one sentence: Her roommate’s boyfriend physically threatened her when she refused to answer his phone calls, after she had repeatedly told him his girlfriend wasn’t there.

Yes. An hour.




5. Shiny=Good. In general, ledes don’t have specific details like names, numbers, ages, times, etc. They always start, “A Hudson resident was mauled by a pit bull yesterday...”

Unless of course, the specific detail is shocking or out of the ordinary. Like a five-year-old getting 45 stitches. Sure you should never lose the forest for the trees, but some trees are pretty freakin interesting.




*Journalism 1. Have I mentioned I’m pretentious, and love to show off my insider knowledge?