Installment+19

South of Denver

Chapter 19 - April 23, 2005

It was a big week for The Rock, in almost every way.

Big awards. Well, big for us. We got a letter from the Colorado Press Association (our state professional group) on Monday that the paper had won all five categories we entered (best breadth of coverage, best photography, best page design.) in the state 3A classification. It's my favorite kind of competition, since it required three complete issues of work for each category. No "one shot" excellence there.

On the other hand, 3A is made up of the smallest schools in the state. It's not that we don't belong there (we have 440 kids in two grades), but I'd like to think we are playing "up a level" or two. Anyway, the staff was very pleased, and the three freshmen who have been the leaders all year - Chelsea, Susie and Brielle - will go with me to the awards luncheon at the Denver Press Club in May. I share their excitement.

On Tuesday, a representative from the Colorado Press Women stopped in during class to present three state awards in their annual contest. Chelsea got second in editorial writing and David got a second in graphics. Susie won first in the state in column writing, and goes on to nationals. And a reporter from the local paper came by to talk with the kids, and that was exciting for them. In this competition, there are no classes, so I went on and on about how proud I was and about how proud they should be, holding their own against schools five and six times our size.

Being me, I couldn't resist asking Susie, "So what will you do for an encore?"

No reply, but I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.

Big paper. We published our first 16-page edition on Wednesday, with a double truck on Columbine's sixth anniversary, an entire page remembering Kent State in 1970, and, of course, a page on marijuana (it was 4-20, for goodness sake). The front page was a giant full-color menu, with art by David.

When the principal saw the cover (a day earlier than our readers), his first response was, "Is that a marijuana leaf on the cover?"

It was.

Big yawn. The marijuana page turned out to be the single most boring drug page ever published. Despite all my sermons about journalism being about people, there were very few people to be found on the page. The principal and our security officer were the only humans to appear. There was an interesting piece on the history of the 4-20 phenomenon, and a cool timeline of the history of cannabis, but the rest of the page seemed like an encyclopedia entry. You will also be glad to know that the number one song about pot is "Smoke Two Joints," by Sublime, and the top movie about pot is "Grass" (a documentary), according to the intrepid maestro team.

As it turned out, the marijuana page played on page 11, just opposite a page on eating healthy on page 10. I thought we should have played the marijuana first, and THEN the eating. Well, that's the way I remember it, anyway.

Big drop. One of the school's two most popular spring sports is boys lacrosse, and we were somewhat shocked on Monday, as final touches were completed before sending the PDFs to the printer, that the reporter had simply blown off the assignment of taking readers to a lacrosse practice and trying to help us understand why so many kids are so fired up about this game. When we tried Plan B (let's go out to practice after school and save the day), it turned out that the entire lacrosse team was out of town, playing a make-up game at Fort Collins. Lindsey, the distraught page editor (who really should have seen this coming), tried to call the players on the team bus via cellphone to do some quick interviews, but even that technologically cool solution failed. We found some mediocre photos and threw them on the page and, essentially, punted.

Big dream. We have 17 staff members. We published 16 pages. For the first time in my advising career, I threw caution to the wind and everyone on the staff was a page manager (Chelsea shared the Kent State page with Mike). Perhaps I was giddy from the marijuana page. Perhaps I was flashing back to my youth and memories of Neil Young songs. Whatever it was, my idealism got stomped on.

Two kids seemed simply overwhelmed. Some seemed genuinely paralyzed at times. Most handled the pressure, especially first-time page managers Sarah and Jenna and Aaron, who spent hours and hours last Saturday struggling through how to create a readable page and learn the nuances of InDesign at the same time. Of course, Chelsea and Brielle and Susie were amazing, but they were so wrapped up in their own pages that they had little time to help others.

Let's just say this: we will not be trying the 17 page manager experiment again for the May issue.

Big coloring. After an exhausting week, we colored on Friday. Specially, we added personalized color to our posters advertising our literary-art supplement, which will be a pull out in our final issue.

Kelsey was delighted, as was most of the staff. "Mr. Kennedy," she said, "you saved my life with this!"

Everyone is feeling a bit frazzled. I postponed the critique until Monday.

Jack Kennedy

Rock Canyon High School

Highlands Ranch CO 80124

 jkkennedy@comcast.net

 jack.kennedy@dcsdk12.org

Note: This is part of a series of columns on working with a completely untrained staff. It is cryptotherapy for me. It may occasionally provide something positive for you. It's all uncharted territory, that's for sure.