{"id":7956,"date":"2025-07-22T21:12:34","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T21:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/?p=7956"},"modified":"2026-01-18T22:59:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T03:59:00","slug":"speed-is-the-powerhouse-of-a-journalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/07\/speed-is-the-powerhouse-of-a-journalist\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling the rigorous workload"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stamina. Quicker fingers. Thirty extra seconds. All things students would have traded a rib for during the first few days of the Medill cherub program.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason notepads and laptops didn\u2019t make that list. Up-and-coming journalists found out they had to learn to work in chaos. There\u2019s no better time to learn that than the start.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt the beginning, it\u2019s teaching the importance of deadlines,\u201d community and academic associate Ben Shapiro said. \u201cAs you get through the program, deadlines space out. It works really well because you start off with a bang and it\u2019s all uphill from there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Cherubs typed frantic notes and listened desperately to intertwined fast-paced narratives for hours. Deadlines were set 40, 30, then 20 minutes after each starting point, and herds of panicky adolescents surged up into the hallways to write.<\/span><\/p>\n

It initially sounded like hell, especially to the nervous and unacclimatized. It was far from that to Logan Szymanski from Edwardsville, Illinois.<\/span><\/p>\n

His friend had gone to a different summer program and was complaining about how the environment wasn\u2019t rigorous enough. Szymanski was \u201cworried it would be the same,\u201d and was pleasantly surprised.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe come here, and we\u2019re immediately on that grind,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

That grind is more than just typing away. It\u2019s about finding the dedication to journalism, and cherubs pulled out the gusto to report for their lives.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was originally a bit overwhelming,\u201d said David Singer from Rye, New York. \u201cBut getting more exposed to it has made it more enjoyable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning how to move at the speed of light the hard way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":8519,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[493],"class_list":["post-7956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics"],"acf":[],"authors":[{"term_id":493,"user_id":242,"is_guest":0,"slug":"gracelu","display_name":"Grace Lu","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/684de916374477322e65c4e11cb7a8fab942368d20254a2da8ed7a2d7590e208?s=96&d=mm&r=g","author_category":"","user_url":"","last_name":"Lu","first_name":"Grace","job_title":"","description":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7956","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\/242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7956"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10839,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7956\/revisions\/10839"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7956"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cherubs.medill.northwestern.edu\/2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=7956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}