Lahore parish organises journalism workshop
Lahore (AsiaNews) The newly formed 'Share and Care' group of St. Mary's Church, Lahore, organised a one day workshop for 30 boys and girls, teachers and catechists at St. Thomas High School; its goal: develop readers' media skills and critical mind and prepare the participants to work on their own newsletter.
Fr Morris Jalal, OFM Cap, parish priest and chairman of the Share and Care group, laid out the news writing workshop's objectives.
First of all, it wants to organize the youth so that they can better use their time.
Secondly, it wants to train them to look at the country and the worked in a positive way but with critical mind. "Unless they read and watch the news they cannot come to know what is going on in the world," Father Jalal said.
Thirdly, he announced that in August the parish intends to start its own quarterly newsletter in which the young participants will be able to put their skills to the test in covering newsworthy issues. And they will also do the same for local Urdu or English magazines.
Fr Inayat Bernard, who will be the budding new reporters' main resource person, described to his young audience the five W of news reportingthe Who, What, Where, When, Why of communication, not to mention the How.
He explained how the news writer must also keep in mind his or her target audience, whether it is national or international public something that allows the reporter to learn from his or her own news reporting.
To start off his would-be journalists, Father Bernard mentioned St. Mary's parish June 16 fund raising that netted 140,000 rupees (US$ 2,400) for the Parish's post Matric students. In ten years time, up to 1,000 students could graduate from the parish school.
He asked them to report on this event using the main elements of news writing they were learning and sent them out to report on three different aspects of the fund raising event, namely the fund raising proper, book launching and career guidance programmes.
The students came back an hour later and shared their information with the entire group. They went through the process of editing the information and proof-reading the texts and were shown how to make their news stories more relevant for national and international readers.
The workshop ended with the young reporters asked to send in their news on a regular basis, in either Urdu or English, to the parish magazines. They were also encouraged not to give up should their first articles fall short off established standards. (IB)
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