After working on writing and developing good stories for the first couple days of MIPA camp, the Writing and Designing the Newspaper class is taking a new approach to journalism: designing. Most of the students in the class have little to no experience with the application and the class today will teach them how to create and layout a page of their own.
They began with paper layouts of a page they wanted to make, and sketched out where they’d like to put each of their elements. Jody Mackey, the teacher of the class, provided them with several subparts that they could choose to add to their page, such as teasers, main stories, side bars, weather reports, and so on.
“We’ve got a lot going on today; the students are each learning how to map out their own page, which they will then open and try to recreate on InDesign,” Mackey said. “Each student has a different design which they sketched out on a piece of paper and they will use it to design their page.”
A couple students in the class have worked with InDesign before and are finding the day’s activities easy.
“I’ve had a trimester of newspaper before, where I worked with the program all the time,” Alyssa Smith, student at Ithaca High School said. “This class is helping me to understand what all my different options are and how to best design the page for the story.”
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