Blog Has Moved!

Our blog has moved to: www.sophia.smith.edu/blog/sophian

Sophian Offices Clean-Out Party

When: Saturday, October 18, 1-3 p.m.

Where: Capen Annex

Come help us clean out our offices and improve our workspace! If you enjoy the adventure involved in poking through an old drawer and wondering if the fuzzy ball in the back corner is an old sweatshirt or a dead animal, then join us as we rummage through decades of Sophian history and get covered in cobwebs and dust.

Weekly Suggestions

Here are this week's suggestions:

When writers/photo staff submit photo captions, they MUST provide captions or the appropriate information for us to write a caption.

Don't send any articles in the body of an E-mail.

When Smith students are quoted or mentioned in an article, please add their years as well. Writers should also add their years for their bylines.

Shorter paragraphs please!

Avoid cliches, similes, exclamation points, and contradictions.

Production Note

On Election Day (Tuesday, November 4), we will not be working on the Sophian. Instead, that week, we will try to get as much work done on Monday as we can, and then finish production on Wednesday morning.

Weekly Suggestions

Every week, while we are doing final proofreading on the Sophian in the early hours of the morning, the Associate Editors and I make a list of various style errors and suggestions that we notice often in articles. These comments are then talked about at our weekly staff meeting, but starting this week, you'll be able to read them on this blog.

• Use shorter paragraphs
• Don't use exclamation points!
• Avoid "cutesy" writing (if you're using exclamation points, you have probably crossed into the realm of "cutesy.")
• Avoid slang
• Don't say "in my opinion"- this should definitely NEVER happen in a News article, but it shouldn't appear in an Opinions article either. If you just state your point, without saying "I think" or "in my opinion" or (God forbid) "I feel," it sounds a lot more convincing.

Check back next week for more tips!

Anna Newman, Editor-in-Chief

The future of newspapers?

This Newsweek article explores the technology of e-newspapers and how devices like the Kindle are slowly transforming our written world.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/157580

Sleater-Kinney Video

To anyone who read Pop Rocks and Coke the week it focused on Sleater-Kinney and the rise of riotgrrrl, video footage of the Mexico City performance of "Rockin' in the Free World" with Pearl Jam (and wrestling masks) can be found here. A link to the original article is here.

Philip Bennett, Top Washington Post Editor, to Discuss the Presidential Race at Amherst College Oct. 1

(From the Amherst College Activities site -- https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2008/09/node/65304)

Philip Bennett, managing editor of The Washington Post, will discuss “The Presidential Race: What’s the Story?” as well as his paper’s coverage of the 2008 campaign on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 8 p.m. in the Babbott Room of the Octagon at Amherst College. Sponsored by the Victor S. Johnson Lectureship Fund at Amherst, Bennett’s talk is free and open to the public.

Prior to his tenure at The Post, Bennett wrote for The Lima Times in Peru and The Boston Globe, where he was a reporter on the metro staff, a foreign correspondent covering Latin America and later a foreign editor. He left The Globe to join The Post in 1997 as a deputy national editor for coverage of national security, defense and foreign policy and was subsequently named assistant managing editor for foreign news before being promoted to managing editor in 2004. During his five years overseeing foreign news, the newspaper’s international coverage was recognized with numerous awards, including two Pulitzer prizes for international reporting, most recently for coverage of the war in Iraq. Now, as The Post’s second-ranking editor, he supervises 800 journalists in a newsroom that produces one of the country’s leading daily newspapers and contributes to washingtonpost.com. Since he took that position, The Post has been awarded ten Pulitzer Prizes.

Born in San Francisco, Bennett graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a degree in history. He and his family live in Maryland.

The Victor S. Johnson Lectureship Fund was established in memory of Victor S. Johnson (1882-1943) by his sons for the purpose of “bringing to the campus each year a stimulating individual worthy of the lectureship’s purpose of serving the best tradition of the liberal arts and individual freedom.”

Journalism Event Announcement: Harvard's Journalism and Media Fair

The fair will be held on Friday, October 10 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and again from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. (there will be a lunch break, a panel, and interviews from 1-3 p.m.). We have representatives from 27 organizations committed, and a number of them are interested in conducting interviews with students for internships and full-time positions from 2-3 p.m. on Oct. 10. It will be held at The Crimson's building-- located at 14 Plympton Street, Cambridge 02138 (for googlemaps-ing purposes).

You can check out the full list of recruiters who will be in attendance here. Below are the recruiters requesting resumes and clips from interested potential applicants:

Boston Magazine
Village Voice
Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern
New York Sun
Boston Globe
Associated Press
ABC News
Edelman Public Relations
Financial Times
Congressional Quarterly

If you want to interview with any of the above outlets at the fair:

• Please send an e-mail with your resume and 5-10 clips attached to crimsonjournalismfair@gmail.com with the subject line "Journalism Fair Info - Your Name" replacing "Your Name" with, well, your name. In the body of the e-mail, please write the names of all the outlets you'd like us to forward your information on to.
• Please title your attachments as such: "Your Name - Resume" and "Your Name - Clips," so each e-mail should carry with it two and only two attachments (all clips should be in a single document).
• All information must be in to crimsonjournalismfair@gmail.com by this Thursday, Oct. 2, at 11:59 p.m.
• A few more notes: The Wall Street Journal will be holding interviews the day of the fair, too, but they request that interested applicants sign up on Oct. 10 for interviews later that day. In addition, The Boston Globe requests that interested applicants also fill out their general internship application online to supplement their resume and clips.
• We'll pass the information on to all the recruiters, and they'll be in touch with you regarding interviews the day of the fair.
  

With questions e-mail Aditi (balakris@fas.harvard.edu) or Malcom, the Crimson's president (mglenn@fas.harvard.edu).

The Sophian will not be offering transportation to the event, but if you are interested in organizing a group, E-mail sophian@email.smith.edu by Monday, Oct. 6.

Our First Blog

Welcome to the Smith College Sophian's new blog!

Over the following year, we hope to use this blog as a way to reach out to the staff of the Sophian and to build a journalistic community at Smith.

Bookmark this blog, so that in the coming weeks, you'll have access to:

Weekly suggestions and tips
Announcement of our Staffers of the Week
Advice on how to write a news article, sports story, etc.
Notes on AP Style and relevant Smith Style
Links to interesting news articles and websites
Discussions about mass media and journalism in today's world
Experiences with journalism internships
Announcements of journalism events and opportunities
Suggestions on how to improve the Sophian
Photos of the Sophian staff at work

Keep checking the blog for new content, make comments and let us know what you want to see both online and in print!