By Jonathan Arkin
Student Writer

Hundreds of high school students visited USC Annenberg on Nov. 20 for a program of workshops and panels hosted by award-winning journalists that offered them introductions to the world of newsgathering, editing and reporting.

This year’s High School Journalism Day, sponsored by the McCormick Foundation, brought 275 students and teachers from more than 50 schools and gave them hands-on experience performing the kind of work they can expect to find as professional journalists themselves.

“Take advantage of the day and all these terrific folks from our profession and our faculty,” School of Journalism director Geneva Overholser told the students. “It’s a great time to be in journalism. We’re re-inventing it every day, and you’re going to be an important part of that re-invention.”

Statistically, Overholser said, working on high school newspapers is the number one indicator of a future career in journalism – a truism taken up by many of the day’s panels and presentations, as the young reporters and on-air personalities heard Annenberg faculty and guests speak about investigative journalism, ethics and multimedia storytelling.

“Students coming out of USC get hired because they’re multimedia reporters,” journalism professor Judy Muller told an auditorium filled with high school students instead of the typical USC classmates.

Willa Seidenberg , who directs Annenberg Radio News and advises the multimedia Intersections project, spoke to roomful of high school instructors and advisors on the need for adding diversity to the next generation of journalists and to their work in the field.

“We need to provide media literacy and to provide students in the community opportunities to contribute,” Seidenfeld said of Annenberg’s efforts to cover the community at large and to attract a diverse body of students to do so. “Geneva talked about this experimentation with new forms of journalism …We wanted to really have a dialogue with community people. We can be a place where people in the community can get involved, and we can become an aggregator of content for South Los Angeles.”

There were several simultaneous choices of labs, talks and workshops for the students to attend during the day. While journalism professor Marc Cooper and public relations professor Jennifer Floto hosted workshops on news writing and public relations, respectively, Cal State Fullerton professor Tom Clanin held a discussion on the importance of journalistic ethics.

“Credibility – that’s all you really have,” Clanin said. “You have to be credible, because otherwise you’ll die. Nobody will listen to you … And, you have to be accurate. Today, reporters have to be experts at everything.”

In addition to the roundtable discussions and press conferences, students were treated to a special hands-on lab at Annenberg TV News – the student-run broadcast news operation at USC – and visited both the newsroom and the studios where the newscast are taped.

“We have them come into the newsroom and we sort of run them through what we do,” said ATVN’s sports director, Alex Goldsmith (Broadcast Journalism ’10), one of USC’s most recent Chick Hearn Memorial Scholarship award winner. “We show them a highlight reel, take them into the studio and we train them in 10 minutes on every studio position and have them put on a little show, switch positions then we run it again. They had a great time.”

The visiting students’ advisors also participated – with some of them returning for the second and third time.

“I always look forward to it every year,” said Timothy Ritenour, a journalism and English teacher at John F. Kennedy Senior High School in Granada Hills, “because it gives them a chance to meet their peers, but also to get acquainted with a collegiate environment.”

One of Ritenour’s students, Savannah Smith, grabbed an Annenberg application on her way out to a campus tour.

“Anything that says ‘journalism’ on it is all mine,” said Smith, who came with her journalism class and has already been writing for several years. “Annenberg’s got a good essence about it. It’s got a good aura, it’s extremely prestigious and it’s one of the top programs. If you want to be a journalist, this is the place to be.”