Every year the newspaper journalism class from McIntosh High School attends the GSPA Fall Conference held at the University of Georgia (UGA).  This year the conference was held at the Tate Student Center on Oct. 27. The Trail staff attend a variety of workshops offered during four sessions on Thursday.

In session A, senior Andrew Schlappi attended the “Beyond Selling Ads” class. The speaker was Ms. Elizabeth Ponson, a senior at UGA who will graduate in May with a bachelors degree in advertising. Andrew said, “The class was great. She taught us how to create our own ads, and I am really excited to put that to use with the Trail and maybe even as a career.”

In session B, senior Tyler Baccarny attended the “Managing Your Site” class. The speaker was Ms. Lauren Herbert, another senior at UGA. She will graduate in May with a degree in broadcasting. Tyler said, “[Ms. Herbert] talked briefly about how to manage a site and quickly veered to how to use social media. The class was supposed to be about how to effectively utilize our website. Because of the questions that other students asked from other newspapers, the topic did switch to covering social media usage. I was annoyed that we got off topic, but I definitely learned a lot about the social media usage.”

In session C, sophomore CeCi Giordano attended “Storytelling with Multimedia.” This session was led by UGA seniors Dillon Thompson, Schafer Sirmer, and Joseph Yourski. CeCi said, “The point of the session was to make articles more interesting by using different graphics and pictures and add-ons. For instance, they showed us how to incorporate a gif to make the story more relatable for students.”

For session D, sophomore Kamryn Torr attended a leadership series class led by Ms. Roxanna Gandia, another senior at UGA. Kamryn said, “The speaker did not talk much. We all came in and were partnered up randomly and then were told to complete a series of tasks. All of the tasks involved different ways to complete them …. After completing, we got with our partners and had to argue whose way of completion was better.”

The conference provided more than 50 sessions, most of which were suitable for students interested in any area of journalism. Advisers also attended several sessions designed specifically for them. In addition to UGA student presenters, professors and other professionals in the journalism field conducted several sessions.