Tag Archives: NECC Observer

News

Introducing the Observer staff:

and  

For more than 50 years, the Observer has been the forum for the very best of the journalism students here at NECC to showcase their talent and obtain real-world work experience.  Unlike that “real world,” the Observer begins each year with a large percentage of new staff members who need to learn the ropes.  This includes learning photo and design software that may be previously unfamiliar to them and cultivating new relationships with sources.  Sometimes, this leads to a rocky start for the first few editions of the year and has made it difficult for our paper, and our website, to reach its full potential.

In response to this, veteran members of the Observer staff have been on campus all summer following important news and changes.  New staff has been hard at work training and a web editor has been added to ensure the most up to date content on our social media sites.  We are bringing back a Campus Life page and a page that is Just For Fun, and we look forward to running your cartoons, pictures, letters to the editor and story ideas.  This newspaper is for you.  Look for all of the changes and let us know what you think.

I am honored to work with this talented team of journalists.

Editorial

Meta Toolkit

 

A news employee wears a lot of hats, especially on a small, student-run paper like this one. That can be a really good thing! It’s a great opportunity to learn a whole lot of valuable skills and acquire some very useful knowledge.

To take the best possible advantage of that, there are some other skills you’ll want to keep in mind.
Getting good at things is a skill you can get good at. It’s called rapid skill acquisition — you can learn how to identify the core principles in any discipline, and, with a little time, effort and enthusiasm, get pretty good at it. Not great. Maybe not even professional. But good enough that you could put it on your resume.

If you sign up for the Observer (and there are openings) you’ll have the opportunity to get reasonably competent in some very valuable computer skills. You’ll get experience with programs like Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, and with WordPress.

These are the programs that professionals use to edit photos, to design publications. They’re very powerful programs, and one of the things you should keep in mind is that if you think something ought to be possible using them, there’s a really good chance that it is. You may have to do some Googling to figure out what the feature is called, where to find it and how to use it. (Though with experience you’ll get the hang of exploring to find the things you’re looking for.)

But when you know it should be there, you’ll often be able to figure out where to find it.
Also: Learn keyboard shortcuts. You can’t imagine how much time you’ll save.

You can also learn how to Google. Like, really Google. It’s one of the best research skills you can develop for getting good introductiory information about any given topic.

I’ll let you do some digging on your own but the main points are: use search settings to narrow your range; learn search modifiers (putting site:[url] returns only results from a particular website. Putting a phrase in quotation marks returns only results that contain those words in exactly that order.); and word choice.

Word choice is possibly the most powerful one. Definitely a good one to learn as a writer: get the hang of guessing what other people would say about the thing you want to find, and you’ll be able to effectively search for it. (And you’ll be better at writing about things in a way that helps people find it. Which is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Which is a skill you can put on your resume.)

In some small part, journalism is about becoming a kind-of-expert on a dozen things a week for long enough to explain the basic idea to non-experts. That’s a really cool thing to be able to do! And it’s a thing you can learn how to do, and get better at.

It’s really important to understand that you can improve your ability to acquire skills, and you can improve your ability to learn and use information.

Uncategorized

The NECC Observer is hiring

 

The NECC Observer is looking to hire a staff writer, preferably someone who would be willing to focus on Lawrence campus coverage, to join the team.
To be eligible, students must have taken or be currently taking Journalism 1.
Students who work for the NECC Observer receive a $300 stipend per semester spent working on the paper.
Students interested in applying should contact faculty advisor Mary Jo Shafer at mshafer@necc.mass.edu with a sample of writing for review.