Hello world! This is Ashley Hum of the Blue Crew, reporting live from George Mason University’s WJMC 2015.
Today was a big day for all National Youth Correspondents. Though we didn’t travel off campus, we were traversing it all day listening to various speakers.
Recruitment and Career Day (part 1)
First up was David Culver of NBC, who spoke to us about rediscovering his Cuban roots. He played for us a documentary of the process that had aired on NBC previously, entitled Rediscovering Cuba: A Journey Home. I’ve always found it interesting when reporters use their journalist skills to delve into their past (such as David Carr in his book The Night of the Gun). Human memories can fade, but records are – generally – accurate and long-lasting. The documentary was full of emotions and people, two ingredients that inevitably make a good story.
The next person to speak with us was Carol Guzy, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, spoke to us about her photographs and the stories behind them. In her speech, she was quiet and sad, though her passion still showed through her script. The slideshow she showed us after her presentation was incredibly moving, covering mostlu the major disasters and tragedies of the past 30 years (though there were some more personal stories and happiness hidden in there as well). Before she even got on stage, April and Melissa (Blue Crew’s Faculty Advisor and Junior Faculty Advisor, respectively) had warned us that we would cry. They knew what they were talking about, for tissues were passed around, and I could hear sniffles throughout throughout the classroom. My eyes began to water and tears began to roll down my cheeks. This was the most moving session that has taken place so far this week. What finally broke me was the 9/11 pictures – seeing the abject terror and anguish on the faces of the survivors, and the incredible amount of damage sustained by the people and the place.
Press Conference
After we had dried our eyes and given Carol Guzy a round of thunderous applause, it was back upstairs with us, to yet another Color Group meeting. This meeting was to be the longest meeting we would have this week, because it was time for the press conference. Since the press conference itself only took about 12 minutes, we had time beforehand to prepare. Depending on our positions in the press conference, we prepared opening statements, strategized how to keep order in the meeting, prepared questions or prepared to answer questions.
The press conference went off without a hitch, although I’ll confess that I for one was pretty terrified being up in front of everybody answering questions. The reporters asked some hard questions, and ended up getting fairly annoyed with the answer “This is an active investigation, and so we cannot comment at this time”. However, they worked with what they had, and what we didn’t have. The city manager in particular was great at thinking on her feet and providing answers. We all learned how hard it is for officials to answer questions, and developed new insight as to why they often dodge the question completely.
After the body of press conference, those of us who had to answer questions were done. Having nothing else to do, we rehashed the process of the press conference amongst ourselves while the reporters busily worked on their stories.
Now, one of the cool parts about this press conference were the roles of the reporters. The scenario had been designed so that the news outlets from which the reporters supposedly hailed were wide and varied, from the St. Louis Dispatch to Fox News to Al Jazeera America. Nor were they all bound to print sources either – there was a radio station and a TV news report included in the pool as well.
Besides the press pool, there were the roles of Mayor, City Manager, Police Chief, Press Secretary for the City of Ferguson, Press Secretary for the ACLU and the representative of the ACLU of Missouri that all had to be filled.
Roughly 45 minutes later, the reporters had their stories ready to present.
Recruitment and Career Day (part 2)
After the press conference, we dove right back into classes. Sitting in the cinema, Amy Takayama-Perez, Dean of Admissions for George Mason University, talked to us about going to Mason. She told us about scholarships, programs, etc. and learned what we were looking for in colleges. One interesting thing she noted was that as WJMC alumni, if any of us apply to Mason, get accepted, and attend, we automatically get an $8000 scholarship, to be paid in $2000 increments beginning freshman year. Certainly puts a positive spin on things, doesn’t it?
We filed back into Dewberry hall then, to learn about entertainment journalism. Kevin McCarthy was the speaker, an entertainment reporter and film critic for Fox News. He ranked up with Sonya Ross in terms of engaging an audience and making them laugh, while still getting the point across. WJMC certainly attracts dedicated speakers, as he Skyped in from Spain just to talk with us! He did a great job with the stories in his speech and the answers to our questions. He even accepted a promposal from one of the girls! This was definitely one of the more entertaining sessions so far this week.
The last sessions of the day were breakout sessions, with roughly twenty correspondents in each session.
I attended the session held by Tom Jackman, a Washington Post reporter. He’s been on the crime beat for many years, but I found out that he’s really trying to get away from that, though the stories won’t stop falling in his lap. He has a unique teaching style in that he showed us what he did, not merely told us what he did. He created mock story about automatic license plate readers and proceeded to interview half the class. He also recounted various stories of cases he’s covered and people he’s met. He’s met so many interesting people! For example, he once covered the story of 7 (now 11) year old boy who had seizures and raised money in order to buy a seizure-detecting dog. He also wrote a story on Virginia woman who opened a burlesque club in China. He was incredibly interesting, and when I got a chance to speak with him after the session, he was very willing to talk to me and give me his business card. (Score for the elevator speech!)
The last thing on today’s agenda was the color group meeting. We briefly debriefed on how we thought our press conference went (pretty darn great, though necessarily vague), and went over tomorrow’s schedule (which will be even more exhausting than usual; stay tuned!). We were dismissed early – woohoo!
All in all, another thoroughly exhausting but most definitely fun and information-packed day at WJMC 2015.
This is Ashley Hum, of WJMC 2015’s Blue Crew, signing off for now.
quirkyhuman 