Just coming back from a Journalism Association of Community Colleges (JACC) conference in Los Angeles makes jumping directly into our production week very interesting. At this conference, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced journalism in such intensity and competitiveness before.

March 31 and April 1, the two full days of the conference, were simply packed with contests and workshops. On March 31, I attended a workshop on covering press conferences, ran off to cover the press conference, and then went into a writing lab where I had 75 minutes to type up my story. Directly following that lab, I went on to participate in a copyediting contest and relaxed for a couple hours before attending the mail-in-awards ceremony. Following the ceremony, I later ran off to another conference room to watch a hip hop dance group perform and speak and again walk across the hall to a computer lab where I had 75 minutes to type up the story.

The next morning I completed a contest on headline writing and spent the rest of the day in workshops. There are various workshops offered at the conference. I attended workshops on coaching the newsroom, plagiarism, and citizen journalism. There were also workshops involving new technology that are now penetrating the newsrooms, such as podcasting, and the latest designing software. As a large group of journalism students from community colleges across the state, we get to see how other journalism students and other newspapers run their papers.

We took home a few awards too; we received three awards for mail in entries which are articles we cut out of our paper and submit to the contest ahead of time. Two members of our staff also won awards for contests that were completed on the spot.

Business/Circulation manager, Jonathan Dipratna, won an honorable mention for the opinion writing contest and News editor, John Harrison, won 2nd place for an on the spot editorial cartoon drawing contest.

Overall the conference was an amazing experience. The Skyline View staff plans to incorporate much of what we’ve learned from this experience into making our paper even better.