Final Reflection

On my first day as a member of the Lasso, I established some goals for my first year of Journalism class. Through this process, I determined that I would mainly focus on learning the basics to producing high quality articles. I feel confident that I have achieved this goal. Having entered the class with very little knowledge of how a news publication operates, it was enlightening to experience this process first hand. Being thrust into the process of producing content was helpful in that it made me adapt and learn how the Lasso works. In addition to simply figuring out, our specific lessons and the style guide provided good resources to rely on when I had questions. Another goal I had hoped to accomplish was to successfully produce a number

Prior to joining the Lasso, I had considered news to be synonymous with national politics. However, since then, I have learned that the purpose of journalism is much more than simply educating people on what's happening in Washington D.C.. Firstly, the Lasso revealed that the events inside of a school can still be considered important by a readership. There are many students who consistently visit the Lasso to find out what is happening in the school, showing that newspapers are important in covering nearly everything. Also, I quickly learned that journalism can entertain readers. For example, I wrote a story profiling a specific student, titled “Cole Hellert: Soccer versus school.” This may not be crucial information, but it is nonetheless interesting for the reader. Also, through my time writing under the opinion column, I now recognize the importance of journalism as a vehicle to express opinions. In the case of the Lasso, this relates to student opinions. With my year of experience under the Lasso, I have realized that Journalism, in addition to informing people, can entertain and allow people to express their opinions as

With my second piece, I failed to meet the deadline and turned it in a week late. Since then, I have been pretty good about meeting deadlines assigned for different articles. Generally, my quality of writing has improved as well. My first piece contained many grammatical errors, got a name incorrect, and filed to contextualize a quote. These mistakes were integral to the quality of the article, and I have since worked to avoid having these errors again. Another thing I struggled thing was writing leads. While I still have much room to improve, I am happy with some of the leads I produced. In my profile, I begin with a story of Cole Hellert playing soccer, than zoom to introduce him. This captivates the reader and leads right into the article. Additionally, I came into this year with the idea that I would purely write opinion pieces, but I successfully ventured into other types of stories. Writing news stories and profile pieces helped me understand the extent of journalism. I have also needed to work on writing pieces that interesting for students. My tendencies to write in detail were tested by the needs to make interesting stories. In my story which profiled hate groups in northern Virginia, I worked to cut the article down to a consumable amount so that students would find it interesting. This year has also taught me to experiment with how I can present information. Colter and I