Monday, November 19, 2007 A Fellowship of Campus Journalists By Carmel Loise M. Matus STC Media Communications Student
A SPORTSWRITER of the New York Times once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down in front of a typewriter and open a vein.”
Imagine what a writer has to go through just to open a vein and write a story. He has to go through the ups and downs of gathering the details of a story, face the hassle of getting the job done and be able to meet the deadline the editor set. It's easier said than done, isn’t it?
That’s how a writer’s life goes. That is what a campus journalist does. If newspaper companies have newsrooms with lots of newsprint, computers and journalists pounding on their keyboards, campus journalists do it in a small office they call “school publication.”
In the recently concluded 4th Spectrum Fellowship National Campus Journalism Conference held at the Santuario De La Salle, University of St. La Salle in Bacolod City, young writers, campus journalists, artists and advisers from various campus-based publications gathered for a fellowship, camaraderie and writing!
Delegates from Cebu were April Joy Seville, Carmel Loise Matus and Desiree Balota from St. Theresa's College, and Jefferson Cruz and Jun Nalipay from the University of San Jose Recoletos.
The organizers of the event invited some of the country’s top personalities in the field of writing and journalism to share their expertise and experiences. Among them were ABS-CBN News Channel's The Explainer and Philippine Daily Inquirer Columnist Manuel L. Quezon III for Opinion Writing, Mother Earth Foundation Vice Chair Chin-Chin Gutierrez for the Role of Media in Environmental Consciousness, University of the Philippines Institute for Creative Writing Director Carmelo “Vim” Nadera for Filipino Writing and Nationalism in Writing and Journalism, Former Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism Training Officer Yvonne Chua for Investigative Reporting, and Women’s Rights Advocate lawyer Rowena Guanzon for Gender-Sensitive Journalism.
There were a lot of writing techniques and styles learned during the fellowship. And while writing can be challenging sometimes, we realized that it is not that difficult to do!
