In a community where collaboration through sharing skills, information and assets is a way of life, Rossland News will be working with Seven Summits Centre for Learning to develop our future wordsmiths. Commencing in the new year, the senior students of Seven Summits will have their work published in Rossland News where a different student’s story will be featured each week.
When Seven Summits first approached the newspaper asking if we could host a workshop to show students how to write articles for the press, my initial thoughts were how can I make this interesting enough that our future writers will be interested in taking up a career in the media industry.
I knew I had a large responsibility to teach these students the correct techniques, particularly in a society where we are bombarded with opinionated and biased literature (if you can call it literature), from marketing material, politically and economically skewered messages, or less credible online sources such as social media.
At the beginning of the presentation I asked the 20 students: how many of them regularly read the Rossland News? I was genuinely taken aback to see no show of hands.
This reiterated that the current form of news media is likely to evolve further from its current print and online forms. However these students still need to learn the techniques for non-biased writing styles. For, who knows, these students may well indeed be our future correspondents for local or national media and I owed it to the nation’s readers to give these students a good start!
In the new year keep your eyes peeled for Rossland’s youth telling their stories about our community.