This April, Julia Weis and I joined about 100 other student journalists in The New York Times (NYT) Pulitzer Room for its 11th annual Student Newspaper Editors’ Workshop. To be within the walls of the NYT was awesome in itself, but to be able to listen and discuss journalism with some of the world’s leading journalists was 10 times more inspiring.
The event had only 100 open seats, with a limit of two students per school from schools with student subscriptions to the NYT. When our adviser Katharine Martin got an email about the event, she signed us up immediately.
We got to New York a couple of days early because we got lucky with airline tickets, and because who doesn’t want to explore the Big Apple? The trip was Julia’s first time to the city, so on our first couple of days, we breezed through all of the must-sees. We went to the Top of the Rock(efeller Center) and got the best views of the city without buying the penthouse in the Plaza. We picnicked in Central Park, and we saw Times Square during the day and at night because the space is completely different depending on the time of day. We also explored Brooklyn a bit.
During the trip, we stayed in an Airbnb on the Upper East Side, with a nice man named Ken and his tortoise Luigi. Luigi was probably the second best part of the trip.
We got lost on the subway about eight times during the entire trip (only four days!), and ended up in Queens five of those times—not because we don’t understand how mass transit works, but because I have a tendency to jump on trains without checking to see if it’s going in the right direction first. That’s an adventure.
Kathleen Creedon, left, with Julia Weis atop Rockefeller Center and outside The New York Times.
The workshop was our third and last full day in New York City, and we spent a majority of it inside the NYT building. The Pulitzer Hall is a memorial to all the great things NYT journalists have done, primarily in winning Pulitzer awards. There have been a lot.
It started with some editing practice. We were handed an old NYT article pre-many rounds of editing. After we got into groups and edited, we went around the room and discussed the mistakes we’d found — little things like punctuation and big things like fact discrepancies. It gave us the opportunity to think about the many ways stories should be editing and reviewed, but also allowed us to get talking with student representatives from schools like our own. The two women who sat in front of us were members of a biweekly newspaper in which their executive editors act as copy editors. The man and woman to our left came from a newspaper staff that was entirely volunteer-based. Julia and I were immediately and profusely grateful for the paid staff that works with us at the Trinitonian, including our strong team of copy editors.
By the end of the day, we’d listened to political reporter Nicholas Confessore, assistant editor of graphics Kenan Davis, and many members of their digital team, including Elisabeth Goodridge, editorial director of newsletters and messaging, and Tom Glieden, director of B2B digital subscriptions. However, one of the coolest speakers was one who has never spoken at an event like this: NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger.
Sulzberger talked to us about the importance of journalism and answered students’ questions (including mine about how often he does the daily NYT crossword puzzle. The answer: never).
Julia and I spent our last night hanging around the city. Before hopping on a plane the next morning we worked on Trinitonian stuff at a coffee shop. After all, the news never sleeps!