"The Pride": Investing in the future

For nine days earlier this summer, 22 high school journalists from around the state and some two dozen professionals came together on the campus of Oregon State University to eat, sleep, breathe and do journalism.

It was the annual High School Journalism Institute run by The Oregonian and OSU, begun in the '80s to give hands-on training to talented young people with a goal of boosting newsroom diversity. That goal is more important than ever in today's America. The U.S. population is becoming ever more diverse, with immigrants from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe streaming into our cities and schools. Yet, newsroom staffs are shrinking and becoming less diverse as a result of the beating we've taken during the recession. Unless we reverse the trend, we risk going back to the days when minority voices and viewpoints were too often overlooked or misunderstood.

Enter "The Pride" -- a 40-page tab-sized newspaper produced by the 22 students with the help of their professional mentors. Nearly all are students of color; many are low-income and the first in their family on track to attend college. During their time in Corvallis, camp director Yuxing Zheng writes, the students got "hands-on training in reporting, writing, shooting photos, producing audio slide shows, blogging and other multimedia elements." Along with the print newspaper, they posted lots of content to http://blog.oregonlive.com/teen

Along with profiles of each student, their work encompasses an impressive variety of topics, including Oregon's only all-Muslim cemetery, gay pride, recycling and alternative energy, art and musical theater camps, farm life and Latina identity, just to name a few. The work really is quite good -- the photography especially striking. And it isn't just the students who come away energized from the week. Read Melissa Navas' testimonial: "Editor savors students' oohs, ahs as they see newspaper for first time"

I've been meaning for some time to write about The Pride and this year's camp participants but I wanted to wait until I'd actually gotten through the newspaper. I've been carrying it around for days, squeezing in a story here and a story there while riding the bus to and from work.

A final note: Yuxing (pronounced you-shing) is the shining example of what the journalism institute can do. She attended the camp as a South Albany High School sophomore and did so well she was invited back to be a student assistant. She went on to earn national High School Journalist of the Year honors and admission to Northwestern University's highly regarded journalism school. A handful of internships later, she joined The Oregonian's reporting staff straight out of college and now, in her mid-20s, is directing the whole show. I'm proud to call her my colleague.

Photograph by Melissa Navas

"Waiting for your REAL life to change?"

One of my dear friends -- a fellow journalist, blogger and parent -- is Pam Cytrynbaum, an instructor in the New Media Communications Department at Oregon State University.

We've shared so many conversations over the years about the profession we love, about the students she's taught and I've interviewed and/or spoken to as a guest speaker in her classes at OSU and, previously, at the University of Oregon. We've shared moments of insight and mutual encouragement and -- always -- a good belly laugh over something or other.

So it's with much respect and great enthusiasm that I recommend this piece of hers, written as a blogger for Psychology Today. It's about "the artifice of the 'realness' impulse" -- in other words, it's about the identity crisis that we all experience in one way another, turning our insecurities into self-doubt. Pam offers her take with great honesty and passion. An excerpt:

What is that, exactly, that thing where you're so deeply who you are? Authenticity? True selfhood? Empathy -- given and received simultaneously?

At the core, it feels like this:

I'm being who I am, not who I think they want me to be or who I think I'm expected to be. I am saying what I think. I am responding honestly and being fully present. I feel genuine. My feelings feel genuine. As we talk, as I teach, as I listen, as I write, as we are together in whatever way, it is genuine. It is an electrical charge connecting us. Is it empathy? Is it simply being understood, heard and known? What is it made of? I don't know. But I know when it begins and can feel precisely when it breaks and disconnects. It feels like the only thing that is real.

Adios, Frank

I'm headed to Corvallis this afternoon to join the Oregon State University community in saying goodbye and fare-thee-well to Frank Ragulsky, who's toiled selflessly but effectively as director of OSU Student Media for 28 years.

Frank is one of those guys who's too good to be true -- versatile, dedicated, resourceful and relentlessly cheerful. Over the years, I've seen every one of those qualities on display as Frank moved seamlessly from advising the OSU student newspaper to staging an annual summer workshop for high school yearbook editors to coming up with money for a summer journalism camp for minority high school students.

He served as director of Northwest Scholastic Press, an association for high school publications advisers, and organized the annual Fall Press Day, which brought together professionals, teachers and students for a day of workshops and critiques. And he was always there, if not in person then certainly behind the scenes, in steering OSU students to regional writing conferences and skills development workshops.

During my years as The Oregonian's newsroom recruiter and internship coordinator, I grew to admire Frank's bottomless well of enthusiasm and support for students who gravitated to journalism at Corvallis, despite a decided lack of institutional support.

Oregon State eliminated technical journalism in the early 1990s following state budget cuts. Yet a talented stream of students -- including several who interned at The Oregonian -- threw themselves into the learning laboratory that is The Daily Barometer and now work across the country as professional journalists. Their collective success peaked in 2002, when the Society of Professional Journalists named the Barometer the best collegiate daily in the country.

Prior to the cuts, The Daily Barometer was often a regional winner in the SPJ competition but was never named among the national finalists. Since the early '90s, the newspaper has operated without the benefit of an academic major; more recently, it has joined its peers around the country in making the transition to new media.

This afternoon Frank will be the center of attention at the OSU Memorial Union, as colleagues, current and former students all gather to wish him well in retirement in Alaska. Even those whose lives he touched only briefly know what kind of an impact he made at OSU and beyond.

Consider the tribute from Saba Saleem, a student at Portland's Madison High School, following last year's minority journalism camp at OSU:

"[T]he biggest props go to Frank Ragulsky, the guy who held the piñata together like the paste, and all of us were the paper mache strips. He planned everything for us, got up early to get every thing ready, and went to bed late, cleaning up after our mess each and every day. He was this camp's back bone and we really appreciate what he did to get us all here for free."