NEWS
Journalism students update community with service-learning project
Louisiana Tech journalism students are receiving hands-on experience at bringing the university and the community together.
Students enrolled in the spring feature writing course are working to update the community about activities occurring at Tech, from baseball and softball to HabiTECH for Humanity and the Lives Lost to Alcohol silhouettes on the service road.
“I think this project is really constructive for us as young journalists because it allows us to form real-world relationships with a specific group of people,” said Grace Moore, a sophomore journalism major from Waterloo, Iowa. “We are required to stay in contact with the same individuals on a weekly basis, which encourages us to remain creative and professional to maintain good relationships with our sources.”
Moore and her group members are working with HabiTECH for Humanity for the spring quarter and covering the process the architecture majors from Tech are undertaking to design and build a Habitat for Humanityhouse in Ruston. They, along with the other five groups, created a website to post their articles and photographs and update the website weekly.
“I am most looking forward to the insight I can gain through covering the same topic from several different angles,” Moore said. “It’s easy to write 100 stories about 100 different topics, but to dissect a single topic and write eight stories about it takes a higher skill level.”
The goal of the project is for the students to write informative features beneficial to Tech and the Ruston community and to give additional multimedia and writing experience to the students, said Judith Roberts, instructor of the course.
“My hope is that the students will work well as a team, create well-written features on deadline, and publish for the public,” Roberts said. “Unlike other courses, journalism majors have their class work on display, and they need to grow accustomed to writing for a general audience.”
The student work can be viewed by visiting http://www.latech.edu/journalism/multimedia.shtml. Roberts said the majority of the students in the class are freshmen, with this being the third journalism course of the curriculum.