Solid Training for SCU Campus Reporters in Third Year

More than 20 Soochow University’s campus reporters received an entire day’s training on November 19^th as the training camp held by the Secretariat was in its third year. In the morning two experts with journalism backgrounds shared their views and experiences on the principles and skills of news reporting and audio/video news production, while in the afternoon senior campus news editors gave novice reporters various lessons of video news, news writing and audio English news.

The first lesson came from Kuan-Yu Ou, assistant professor of English Department, who talked about responsibilities and skills a campus reporter ought to have. Considering reporters to be readers' eyes, he suggested that they pay attention to what readers care about and provide faithful reports of information. After introducing various structures of news writing, such as the inverted pyramid style and the diamond style, he also offered some useful tips on news interviews, photography, etc.    

The next lecture was given by Yi-Hua Fan, a senior journalist of international news at SET TV News, as she shared her personal experience in making in-depth feature news regarding global topics. By demonstrating a series of documentary films she had produced about Syrian refugees in Turkey, she taught the students video news narration and editing techniques. Fan also encouraged the campus reporters to make best of the time they have during their college years to discover great story topics. She cited herself as an example that she was the first person in Taiwan to uncover the story of the “AIDS Village” in Henan, China, in her junior year in college.

In the afternoon, the student reporters were divided into three teams – audio and video team, news writing team, and English news team – each of which was instructed by senior campus news reporters. Audio and video team completed a video report within only one hour, while English news team produced an all-English audio news broadcast which involved the use of many sounds and audio features, creating a special experience for the ears. And news writing team, composed of all the novice reporters, learned how to write for journalism. They considered all the lectures and lessons very solid and useful, and they also felt a stronger sense of commitment for the coming year.