ACP Journalism Conference

  

Trolley in San Francisco. Photo by William Allison. (For more photos of San Francisco, see our photo gallery.)

      

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, Ding, ding, ding went the bell.

That’s the sound of The Commuter staff in San Francisco for the Associated Collegiate Press (ACP) Journalism Convention.  The Commuter was there from Feb. 28 to Mar. 4.

  

 

 

While the trip in general was very interesting and fun; traveling to San Francisco was all about learning how to improve writing skills, photo skills, and everything else in between.

The ACP convention had a variety of sessions for students in media to attend, such as how to improve your photography skills, how to be more authoritative, and how to make boring things to write, more interesting.  Sessions for the ACP began on Fri. Mar. 1.

Some of the sessions that our staff attended were Why Journalism Needs You, Chicken Salad, and Shoot? Or Don’t Shoot?

Why Journalism Needs You was about learning how writers need to align with the changing demographic and the evolution of our media to engage the people in the conversation about their community.  Nick Raynor helped with pointers on how to achieve this.

Chicken Salad, unlike its name, informed journalists what to do when hours away from deadline and they don’t know what they’re going to do to make that award-winning article.  Michael Koretzky took apart articles and papers and redesigned them all in a matter of minutes.

 

Shoot? Or Don’t Shoot? described where photographers are allowed to shoot and not allowed to shoot.  Public property is fair game and doesn’t invade privacy.  Frank LoMonte showed photos and described what is an appropriate and inappropriate thing to shoot.

Sun. Mar. 4 the last keynote speaker was Mark Fioré, 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for political cartoons, and he was followed by the award ceremony where The Commuter did great and won 6th place in the category “Publication Website Large School”, which is the first ACP award that The Commuter has won since 2011.

There were many interesting things that happened during the trip; the most entertaining on was our very own Ian Butcher, arts and entertainment editor, somehow managing to “break Twitter”.  How?  Well … by posting way too many times and making it to where he couldn’t tweet anything.

Keep an eye out for the changes the Commuter will be making!