{"id":7656,"date":"2025-07-22T20:52:33","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T20:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/?p=7656"},"modified":"2026-01-18T23:16:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T04:16:01","slug":"lecturers-enrich-lessons-with-humor-activities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/07\/lecturers-enrich-lessons-with-humor-activities\/","title":{"rendered":"Lecturers enrich lessons with humor, activities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most days \u2014 often multiple times a day \u2014 cherubs gathered in Fisk Hall for a lecture, eager to learn.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This year, cherubs\u2019 favorite lectures included \u201cInterviewing Techniques\u201d by guest lecturers Bret Begun and Cynthia Wang; \u201cErasing the Archives,\u201d a discussion about what should be removed from already published media; and instructor Erin Ailworth\u2019s lecture on disaster reporting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Professor Jeremy Gilbert spoke to students in the first week about the impact of artificial intelligence on journalism, referencing tools he hopes to develop to engage more readers, such as using AI to adjust the readability of articles for different audiences.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cEvery day, AI is becoming more prominent in our lives. If I become a journalist, I know it&#8217;s going to be involved somehow, and I need to know how to use it,\u201d Braden Stone, from St. Petersburg, Florida, said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Crystal Zhu, from Cupertino, California, enjoyed the ethics lectures. Students and instructors debated about whether it was ethical to publish certain photos, articles and quotes, voting with red, yellow and green cards. \u201cI learned that ethics is really complicated, and everybody can have different thoughts,\u201d Zhu said. \u201cThe standard is different everywhere, and these kinds of ethical debates happen every day in newsrooms.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Begun made his lectures entertaining by engaging with the audience, making him a favorite.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Begun and Wang\u2019s lecture on interviewing involved them demonstrating different ways students should shake hands. Annika Chu, from Palo Alto, California, said, \u201cIt was really funny to watch them act out different scenarios in which they shook hands, where one was floppy and limp and one where they were way too enthusiastic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cherubs\u2019 favorite lectures were the ones they found entertaining and applicable to their futures as journalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":7980,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[456],"class_list":["post-7656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-featured-story"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":456,"user_id":214,"is_guest":0,"slug":"charlottefeller","display_name":"Charlotte Feller","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/ba546ee411695dadde9f398b3b11bd94b1d8011590fb0cec463369bdbd12d364?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Feller","first_name":"Charlotte","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7656"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8841,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7656\/revisions\/8841"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7656"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=7656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}