This article is a quick check in with the Rye College Press Club which started last academic year and has just returned after a summer hiatus. It’s safe to say its been a…rocky start.
Before we get started here’s a quick introduction to press club. It was founded last year as a means for Rye College pupils with an interest in journalism and reporting to be guided by industry professionals in writing articles for Rye News. The club is pretty small, and formed  largely of years 8 and 9s but we’re trying to expand – our aim this term is to recruit some of the new year 7s. Unfortunately its proving difficult to get much interest from the older years as they’re focused on their GCSEs and revision clubs often coincide.
Since its establishment the press club has published three articles and made some headway in a piece of investigative journalism on canteen food but we’ve struggled with deadlines. Our dreams and aspirations for the work we get done week to week is often far from realistic and it took us a while to realise that we were using all our time on brainstorming and none on action, leading to some great ideas but no articles. Since coming to this conclusion we’ve decided to develop the way we work introducing the choice of two possible goals: investigation or article.
For articles we have to go away as individuals or pairs and work on our ideas before the weekly meeting and then present the predeveloped ideas at the meeting in a Dragons’ Den style presentation. If the idea is approved we spend the next week (week two) writing the article which James Stewart or Susan Benn, the Rye News representatives running the press club, go through, review and edit at the next meeting so its ready for publication in the paper in week three. The new system works well as it gives us fixed targets which if missed only mean our project won’t meet its deadline, rather than before when projects were so group lead that an overrun could mean no publication for several weeks.
For the investigative journalism side of writing we’ve changed the focus to being only around one hypothesis. Previous attempts at investigations had been derailed as we uncovered new potentially better stories during reporting. The aim now is to stay on topic and not go down rabbit holes no matter how interesting. Furthermore, it’s okay to leave readers with some questions but the story has to be finished.
The problems we’ve faced aren’t unique to us so if you have any suggestions for other ways we can improve or something you think would make an interesting article, extra brownie points if it’s local, then please do drop us a comment below.
And more articles ARE coming so watch this space…
Thanks for reading. The press club.
Image Credits: Susan Benn .