After four weeks of intensive journalism instruction, cherubs will return to their school publications, bringing with them lessons from their instructors and peers.
Clark Kerkstra of Wallingford, Pennsylvania, said he appreciated having people from different areas of journalism give feedback on his publication.
“You’ve been in your high school newspaper for three or four years now, and there you’ve been in an echo chamber for your entire journalistic career,” he said. “So learning what just doesn’t work, or what doesn’t make sense from these completely new people is very helpful.”
Kerkstra said he has learned a lot from going to workshops such as Instructor John Kupetz’s newspaper critiques and sitting down with his friends to look at each other’s websites.
“When you’re at the place that has 90 of the best high school journalism students from across the country, you can always learn something from all of those perspectives and all of those ideas,” Kerkstra said.
Both Ashlyn Wong of Belmont, California, and Kerkstra said the ethics workshops showed them the impact that journalism can have. They said they both have experience with pushback from their school administrations, and learning about the history of First Amendment rights taught them about the importance of their voices as journalists.
“It inspired me because it showed me how much power journalism has,” Wong said.
Wong and Mimi Yao of Shanghai said they experienced a collective love for journalism as cherubs, and now hope to bring that feeling back to their newsroom. Yao said at home in Shanghai, the passion in her journalism club is “lukewarm” but coming to cherubs has exposed her to a group of people who are genuinely passionate about journalism.
Wong counts herself as one of those passionate people.
“If I implement just a fraction of the care that people have here into our program,” she said, “it’ll improve a lot more.”
