By: Zyra Lou Laysa
| GETTING INVOLVED. The Courier staff (from left) Keith Anthony Linan, John Jireh Hachuela, Maria Criszel Dela Cruz, and Claire Flores take seriously the workshop on page design . |
The Courier editorial staff attended the 45th Philippine Information Agency-Region 6 (PIA-6) campus journalism seminar-workshop at Diamond Jubilee Hall, DepED-Division of Iloilo City, Oct. 9-11, and notched three awards.
The PIA Campus Journalism seminar-workshop is an annual activity participated by student paper writers and publication advisers coming from different schools in Western Visayas.
The basis for conducting this seminar-workshop is the mandate of Republic Act 7079 or the Campus Journalism Act of 1991 that “all schools, universities, SUCs are to publish a campus publication and that those who manage the papers should undergo appropriate training on skills, journalistic competence and paper management.”
PIA hopes that at the end of this activity, participants can apply the concepts of development-oriented journalism in their articles; hone their basic writing, reporting and editorial management skills; and articulate the principles of responsible journalism and apply these in writing news and stories.
Furthermore, participants are expected to incorporate messages on the “Whole-of-Nation Approach in Attaining Sustainable Peace and Development in their news and opinion articles.
Since 2011, the student publication has been sending participants to this gathering of school paper writers and advisers. This year, Maria Criszel Dela Cruz, Claire Flores, Keith Anthony Linan, John Jireh and Prof. Freden Delgado, publication adviser, were chosen to represent the publication.
“It was during the tenure of Atty. Janet C. Mesa as PIA-6 Director and Ms. Elsa S. Subong as Training In-charge when we started joining this seminar-workshop. Now, it is PIA-6 OIC-Regional Head Jaime S. Cabag, Jr. and Leonard T. Pineda, I, Training In-charge, taking charge of this initiative and we are still participating,” Delgado shared.
PIA-6 slated two schedules for tertiary level publications: October 9-11 for HEIs from Capiz, Guimaras, and Iloilo; October 15-17 for HEIs from Aklan, Antique, and Negros Occidental.
During the seminar-workshop, student writers were trained on journalistic writing like news writing, feature writing, opinion and editorial writing, editorial cartooning, sports writing, photojournalism, copyreading/headlining, and page design and layout.
Special topics such as Introduction to Cyber ReadI PH Campaign, Data Journalism and Online Journalism were also taken up in the seminar.
The outputs of the participants in the workshop were evaluated and The Courier editorial staff garnered three awards.
Keith Anthony Linan was awarded Promising in Sports Writing (English) and Promising in Copyreading (Filipino).
As a group, Linan together with John Jireh Hacuela, Maria Criszel Dela Cruz and Claire Flores won Promising in Photojournalism.
The participants were grateful for the opportunity given to them to attend the training.
“We learned so much from the seminar-workshop. The knowledge we gained from the different topics would help us a lot in writing for our publication. We comprise the editorial staff and we owe our fellow students good articles,” Managing Editor Dela Cruz said.