DiSH Visits the Guardian
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Photographs by Isaac Leach 9FGD
On Tuesday, 29th September 2009, DiSH magazine visited The Guardian offices in London. We were going to participate in an educational workshop where we would write our very own newspaper articles and learn how to edit our own work.
We arrived at 8.30am at Brighton Station and after an hour long train journey to St Pancras Station in London, we made our way to The Guardian offices.
We were stunned at the modern building towering infront of us, which was filled with colourful modern furniture and looked more like a trendy hotel than a place of work! After being escorted up to the main offices and seeing journalists quickly typing out stories on their computers, we arrived at The Education Centre.
Mal, the tutor taking us through the day, seated us at one of the many desks containing large Apple Mac computers and explained that we could choose to work in partners, or by ourselves. We were talked through what we had to do and how to use the computers, which had been set up with a variety of newspaper templates for us to work with.
Each computer was linked up to the live news wires coming through directly from Reuters. We were all allowed to choose our own stories to cover and were then given laptops to access the internet and research the article in more depth. Then we chose the templates for our front pages and got to work.
After going to lunch in the cafeteria we returned to the Education Centre and Mal explained that to start off a newspaper article and entice the reader to read the first few sentences, we needed to use 'The 5 Ws: Who, What, When, Where, Why'. We used this template to begin our article and instantly felt like real journalists.
After a few hours of hard work on our articles, we were shown how to edit our text and paste pictures onto our work. Picking the right pictures and editing our work, spellchecking and printing off took a while but afterwards we were pleased with our fantastic looking newspapers. The hard work paid off and this is what a few DiSH members had to say about the day at The Guardian:
"I really enjoyed the experience of going and finding out how newspapers are made - it was great fun!" Lara Blishen 9BNR
"For aspiring journalists, this was a brilliant insight into the world of writing!" Ellie Bishop 9PBR
"I liked learning about how newspapers are written, the structure and the language journalists use." Niamh Anderson 9BNR
"I loved learning how to produce and write a proper newspaper, it was a great experience and I never knew how many different jobs were available in the journalism business." Ruby Williams 9BNR
Written by Olivia Knight and Chloe Holman-Harris 9BNR
