This blog post was written by Josie V. 

This week Structured Writing went to the Daily Hampshire Gazette with the Political Science seminar and had a blast. This field trip was a break in our week of writing college essays, where Alexa gave us prompts from the Common App and we worked through them together. A great activity we partook in was a walk and talk, where Alexa had index cards with prompts on them and we had to each pick one out and tell a story according to what the prompt had said. We also did this on the car ride to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. 

When we got to the Gazette, our tour guide, Laurel Gardner, showed us the various steps to creating a newspaper, from the ideas and information to getting the information on paper and then sending them out. 

We also encountered another staff member, Carol Lollis, who works as the Gazette’s photo editor. She deals with the pictures that go into the newspapers and talked about the ethics and authenticity of each photo. Carol and Dusty Christensen both enjoy their jobs they do. 

I most enjoyed seeing the machines, and how the printing of the text was backwards so it would print on the page frontwards. For color papers, each color had to be on a separate sheet. The colors themselves are different than we are used to: blue is cyan (C) and red is magenta (M)–they also had yellow (Y) and black (K). That makes CMYK.

The Gazette had Dusty Christensen, who covers the political beat, talk about what it was like to be a reporter. He taught us about what makes a strong headline, a good lede, what a “nut graf” is and where it goes (it’s the paragraph that tells the reader all the information about the story in a “nutshell” in one “graf” or paragraph), and how to write a great final kicker. Laurel also helped us with our writing by generously editing the essays we wrote earlier in the week. It was fantastic to get personalized writing advice straight from a professional writer. Her comments were accurate and on point.