Final Stretch

My name is Shahab Adnan. Last summer, I attended Ms. Mariya’s English classes on figurative language and blogging. This summer I was selected again to participate in Ms. Mariya’s journalism program. I am very lucky to have this opportunity. Before these classes, I didn’t know what journalism was, why is it important, and how to produce a newspaper. After five weeks of lessons, I now have a better idea of all those things. For example, I did not know the proper rules for writing different types of articles such as news, opinions, features, and sports.

My favorite part of the program was the field trip to Dawn office in Islamabad. I learned many things there such as how newspapers are printed with a big Harris machine. There are a lot of steps involved in printing a newspaper including layout, intense editing, and proper machine handling. We also learned other things such as how news are gathered at Dawn, what software they use to print their daily newspaper, and all four bureaus work together. Did you know that one roll of newsprint paper can produce 20,000 copies of a newspaper? These rolls are imported from Russia and cost Rs. 45,000 each. What surprised me the most is that Dawn has never had to print a correction for misreporting—what a reliable and credible newspaper!

This week and next week, we are busy finishing up our articles and editing each other’s work. This is our final stretch and layout is the only thing left for us to do. It is very stressful for us because we do not know how to use Microsoft Publisher, the program we will be using to produce our newspaper. I am Opinions Editor and I have four pages to layout. Yikes! I think Ms. Mariya is more stressed than us because she has to edit everyone’s articles and check all the pages by Friday. We do not have enough time but insAllah we will complete our mission. After all, we’ve worked too hard not to.

By Shahab Adnan