media skill workshop

whoa! i didn’t expect to receive a certificate (though just a certificate of attendance) at all from the writing workshop i attended (since it was only for one day). however, it was a nice gesture of the organiser to come out with one.

as you can see from the certificate, the name of the workshop (not ‘course’ as I mentioned earlier) is ‘writing for publication’, and it is the first module of a 3 parts modules of the ‘writedesign media skill workshop’.

for this ‘writing for publication’ workshop, there were only 9 participants. that’s fine with me as i prefer few participants (maximum limit according to organiser was 20). the speaker/facilitator was a journalist from the sun, joseph masilamany. some of you who are regular readers of the sun would have came across his name. oh, i was the only out-station participant!

the workshop was not what i expected – i expected lots of theory input – but it was good in a way as joseph shared his experiences as a journalist in the sun. it was interesting to hear from him about the environment in the news-room. he produced lots of his published articles for us to refer to, at the same time, telling us how to write in such an interesting way so as to attract leaders. there was also a section on how to interview people and then write up story of the interview.

joseph also brought us through to some common terminologies used in the newspaper like blurb, sidebar, page lead, house style and so on. we were shown samples of how to start a story with ‘soft lead’ and ‘hard lead’.

as a reporter who had interviewed some VIPs before, and had worked on leading stories like the altantuya’s case, he had interesting stories to tell, some of which were meant for our ears only – not to be shared here!

module 2, which was earlier on ‘news editing’ only, now included ‘features writing’, so i was thinking of attending again, since i do, do features writing. this time for module 2, i heard the facilitator will be from the star paper. let’s see if my office don’t mind sending me again.