Whitman holds journalism conference

The Black and White, Walt Whitman High School's newspaper, held a journalism conference today to commemorate its 40th anniversary.

The conference was open to staff members of all school newspapers in the region, and was attended by students from Blair and Walter Johnson high schools. The event provided skills workshops on various journalism topics and a host of speakers with ties to the local community.

The conference's keynote speech was made by Judy Hines, founding director of the Newseum, the country's only interactive museum of news, and author of Death by Cheeseburger, a collection of information useful for journalists. She spoke about her idea of the journalist's job and provided a Letterman-esque Top 10 list of things a journalist must do.

Hines' speech was followed by two workshop sessions hosted by a variety of local and national journalists and journalism students, including NBC News correspondent Steve Handelsman, Pulitzer prize-winning commentator Clarence Page, Ron Hutchinson, John Heaney, Beryl Adcock, Savannah Guthrie, Dana Hedgpeth, Yoni Brook, Rachel Zoberman and Toni Johnson.

The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion of a hypothetical situation that tested the ethics and business sense of participants. The discussion question was based on the situation of journalists in the Bay of Pigs fiasco of 1963. The New York Times found out about the invasion the day before it was to happen but suspended the story at the request of the Secretary of State. President Kennedy later said that he wished the paper had printed the story.

Editors and advisors of local school papers who attended the conference played the roles of professional newspaper and television reporters and debated the ethics and business sense of printing a similar story.

The conference also served as a small Black and White reunion. All three advisors that have led the newspaper in its 40 years were present, as were some old staff members. One attending former editor, Rick Berke, now works for the New York Times. Berke made national headlines as editor when he co-authored a story that made the Black and White the first media outlet in the country to announce that President Nixon was exposed to microwave radiation when serving as Vice President, scooping major national news organizations.