Due this week

General Writing. Send in your best work – poems, short stories, essays. (Feel free to do it throughout the year, but this gives you a deadline.)
Deadline: Oct. 10.

To submit to Newspaper Series

  • Log in. (Click "Not a YWP member?" to create an account.)

  • Click "create content" and create an ENTRY
  • Fill out "title," "author name, school & grade" and "prompt" boxes.
  • Paste story into "body."
  • Click "Submit." You are done.
    NOTES: Your account email must be accurate; a "blog" entry must be resubmitted as an ENTRY to be considered.

Reaction to the News: Victims of Shooting Remembered

Victims of Shooting Are Remembered - An amiable senior, a world-class researcher and an avid dancer were among those killed in Virginia. [NYTimes]
I write this to give you guys an example of what you can do on this site ... write about the news. To do this, just click the blue "b" beside the appropriate news story in the NYTIMES or BBC feeds on the bottom right. - gg
I confess that I have been in a daze since yesterday afternoon when I found out about the killings at Virginia Tech. For 33 years I was in the news business, so if I were in any of my previous positions I would have known about this the moment it made the news wires and would be figuring out how to "cover" the story.
As a normal citizen, I was hit in a much different way. I was incredulous. And when I saw how many people had died, I felt a hollowness inside that is, even after a day, very hard to describe. I feel as though I had been up all night, as though someone had opened a spigot and let out all my energy, all my joy.
I find these things inexplicable. I know there are the usual explanations -- a loner who snapped -- and the usual hand wringing -- why do we allow people to have guns? And I found myself wondering why more news energy has been spent on Don Imus than on this horrific massacre.
But then I have the New York Times to fall back on. I have a story like the one to which this is linked -- Victims Remembered.
This is what good journalism is all about -- and the Times did this following 9/11 -- which is to profile the victims, to bring humanity to the story, to tell readers that the victims were people with hopes and dreams and frailties and stories. I can get my head -- and heart -- around that.
Read these. They are wonderful profiles. They put human faces on the sadness and fear and confusion we are all feeling right now.
-geoff gevalt
And feel free to join in the discussion

Taking the Time

Submitted by arthus on May 5, 2007 - 19:28.

Often, in the news, articles are quickly written with the information easily available. The New York Times went above and beyond in their profiling of this horrific event. Instead of simply listing the names of the 33 students and a couple of facts about them, the NY times went out and asked people about these people who died. In short, the New York Times managed to transform numbers into people.

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