Program Manual and Group Portal: Spring 2016 Session
Click the name of your editor to be transported to your group page:
Soo Min Chung | Choha Kim | Rachel Lee | Andrew Park
Gina Kim | Linda Lee | Sophia Lee | Angela Yoo
Editors' Instructions
For JSR writings, please visit jstudentboard.com
Program Emphasis
JSR allows students to see their work published in the most popular news resource for people of Korean descent in America.
The point of the program, however, is not publication. It's education. In fact, JSR is a completely one-of-a-kind immersive education program that is focused just as much on leadership and critical thinking as it is on writing.
As you move through the program, keep the following skills in mind. The goal of each of your semesters is to improve at least somewhat in each of the following categories. Everyone is different, though, and you should go at your own pace.
For students who would like to become editors one day, it's worth noting that these skills are the ones that we take most into consideration when making our editorial decisions.
Reaching Out
If you are not conducting interviews for your JSR articles, then you are doing them wrong. This program isn't just for writing -- you are expected to be a journalist and reach out for interviews. Without those, you won't be published!
A key difference between journalistic work and research papers is that journalistic work requires original reporting, whereas research can be culled from existing sources. Research is crucial to journalism, but "original reporting" also requires talking to people and reporting what they say.
Reaching out for interviews can be hard. Especially for high school students, it can be intimidating to pick up the phone and call someone important. Likewise, it can be discouraging to reach out and to not receive a response. But whether it's intimidating or not, you've got to do it. You won't make it as a journalist if you're afraid to contact sources, but this skill goes beyond journalism: once you've graduated from college, you'll have to create your own career opportunities by reaching out to people you don't know and selling yourself to them. Learning how to do that now will benefit you immensely.
These are some guidelines for how to interview well:
Talk to people who have something to say. Interview people who have a specific connection to your story. These can be people who are involved with the story, or they can be people who have a particular reason to care. For example, you might ask your school's AP Government teacher for her opinion about a Supreme Court ruling, or you might ask your high school's LiNK president for his opinion if you're writing a story about an atrocity in North Korea.
Don't just ask randoms.
Don't just talk to your friends. It's not reaching out if you only talk to people you know. Use your friends when they have relevant perspectives to add to the story, but try to include more voices.
Properly identify your interviewees. Get the person’s first and last name, grade level (if student), name of school, and age. Get his/her title or affiliation if appropriate, such as “math teacher,” or “math student, cheerleader, trumpet player,” etc.
You may only use anonymous sources if your source has a specific and good reason to remain anonymous and you need that source specifically to complete your story.
Prepare. If you coordinate an interview with someone, do not go to it empty-handed. Research the person online, visit her website if she has one, and see if you can find writings or other interviews that she has done. Use these resources to craft specific questions.
If you are doing a personal profile, you must include an interview with the person being profiled.
If you are reviewing an event, do not merely write about the event or program (what it was, how long it was, etc). Ask people who were there to describe it, and ask participants to tell you about the process of putting it on.
Responsibility
You are a citizen of the 21st century. You have no excuse for not checking and responding to your email daily. The worst thing you can do in this program is not communicate with your editor or the program coordinator. In addition to email, your editor may create a Facebook group, a KakaoTalk group, or another social media-based group. Stay in touch with your editor, no matter what.
You are part of an Editorial Group that will rely on you to provide a vital part of a collaborative process. If you don't do your part, you will hurt your group members and make things much more difficult on your editor.
Every single deadline you have is available on this website, which can be accessed from anywhere in the world. If you miss one, it is no one's fault but your own.
Got it?
In short, the JSR program treats its students like adults. You are expected to stay on top of your deadlines and your group work without being nagged or reminded by JSR staff or your editor. You're expected to respond to emails, whether they are from JSR Staff or your editor, in a timely fashion. If you fall behind, you are expected to contact JSR to discuss what you can do to make up your work.
We are not tyrants. JSR is challenging and it has a long schedule, and most students are going to make a few mistakes along the way. That's totally acceptable. What's not acceptable is not taking responsibility for your mistakes. What's even worse is if you blame someone else, such as your editor.
If you need help, or if you need to miss a deadline for some reason, contact JSR and your editor in advance and take pro-active steps to make it up.
Civic and Social Engagement
When deciding about topics, think about those that have the potential to call readers to action or at least inform them about choices they can make.
This newspaper can be your platform to tell others about what is important to you: causes you believe in, events going on in your community, local people who deserve credit for their positive actions, and more. It's an amazing opportunity -- through being published, you can actually impact the world in a positive way.
JSR gives priority to articles that are civically and socially minded, and it gives priority to students whose work explores the news from a unique and specific angle: for example, an article that talks about the impact of a sexist Tumblron body image by interviewing local teenagers; an article that explores the impact of school bullying by interviewing friends of a student who committed suicide after being bullied; or an article that analyzes the pros and cons of SAT boot camps via interviews with students, parents, and adminstrators.
To succeed with that type of writing, you must be aware. You should be paying attention to the issues that are going on in your town and your school, and you should keep your eyes peeled for problems that need to be addressed, controversies that ought to be debated, and citizens who deserve to be praised.
You ought to also be consuming news on a regular basis -- not only from your local paper, but from national and international sources as well. Find some news sources that you like and check them regularly.
The more that consuming the news becomes a habit for you, the easier it will be for you to come up with topics and connect the topics you choose to larger events and issues.
Critical Thinking
There has always been false reporting and "yellow journalism," but we may be living in a Golden Age of poorly-done news.
Online social media has become the most common way for people to share news, although it may also be the most dangerous. While it's made it easy to share good information, social media has also made it quite easy to share bad information. Because they make their money from advertising clicks, many websites that produce misinformation don't even bother to fact-check.
As a journalist, your job is to be a skeptic. Everything that you read or hear -- no matter how factual it seems -- needs to be independently verified. You cannot take a website's word that a statistic is correct or a story isn't false; you should find the website's original source and double check it yourself. Also make sure that you identify where you've gotten your information so that your readers may do the same.
In the video to the right, GroundReport's CEO Rachel Sterne discusses the positive potential of citizen journalism.
The video below highlights some of the potential problems of viral news sharing.
Videos About Interviewing
