When I thought of taking Journalism in Grade 11, I honestly believed it would be quite easy. I thought how hard could it be to write articles? However, my mind changed as soon as I was assigned my first story. My very first story was a controversial news story about the Student Council Elections. My best friend, Shahrose Chaudri was running and another friend Hassaan Toor was running against here. With all the drama going on I knew I could not let that affect my article. My very first issue had to be a non-opinionated piece. I had to write, then rewrite it and then check it again. That is when I found out that writing articles is not that easy. I wrote 3 other stories for the newspaper and one story for our schools very first magazine. My Issue 3 story was an editorial piece on senior life. That was one of my shortest stories because it was mostly my opinion. However, I discovered that writing an editorial piece is harder than writing news stories. So for my next issue I decided to do something different. I decided to take on the task of doing the Senior Interviews for Issue 5. As easy as I thought it would be, I think it was the most difficult task because running after people to give you even 5 minutes is difficult. However, the writing part of this story was easy because I only had to type up what the seniors said. My last issue, Issue 7, was also an interview piece with Shehrbano Taseer. Once again, getting after people to give you their interview, I found one of the most challenging aspects of this course. I mean without their input, there really can’t be an interview piece. During these 3 Issues, I actually had the chance to write a piece for the magazine which was our schools first ever magazine. The moment we knew we had to do an article for this, I knew I wanted to do something about fashion. So Mehak and I took on the task of writing a piece on one of Pakistan’s famous designers, Kamiar Rokni. I personally, thought this would be the hardest piece, however somehow it seemed to be easy. Kami infact did not give us any trouble; neither did we have any trouble putting together the piece.
So in all, I have written editorial pieces, news pieces and interview pieces. From all these, I think I’d like to write news pieces in the future (if I became a journalist that is). And that’s why I am most proud of the first piece I had written; Issue 1-High School Elections, Been There Done That. It was the easiest to write because all the facts were visible, the interviews were easy to get and lastly I think my organization for that piece was quite exceptional. If I look back at the year, I think that the most challenging aspect of the course was the excessive writing and rewriting and editing. Like I said, it is hard to write articles. Organizing an article is not as easy as it looks. Also, getting people to give you an interview is the biggest headache. Some people are just too busy and getting information out of them can take ages. The one thing that I regret not doing is writing another news story. For some odd reason, I love the controversy, the facts and the drama. Also, I find them easier to write, so I should have explored more into news writing than interview pieces.
Journalism has given me a lot of insight. One of the most important things that I have learned this year is how to improve my organizational skills in my pieces. Also, I was fortunate enough to be the editor of the first issue, so I learned how to work with page maker early on. However, the one thing that I find that was the most important was I learned the daily of a journalist. Although, we are only high school journalists that too only for 5 stories, I still learned a lot about how a journalist works. The fact that Luke Martin, a free lance journalist, came in and talked to us, made me realize that Journalism is heavy duty work and to be a journalist you have live eat breathe news 24/7. The Journalism class has really grown me as a person. It has firstly made me more responsible, it has made me appreciate all the journalists who day and night work and it has really influenced my thinking on how to look at things. Journalism taught me for every story there are always two perspectives.
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