WJEA State Conference
8 March 2008
A week from today, 15 March, I’ll be at the Washington Journalism Education Association’s (WJEA) state conference. As I’ve done the previous three years, I’ll be judging high-school students’ write-off entries, though I don’t know in what categories. (If I’m lucky, it’ll be newspaper layout; if not, it’ll be review writing or something else where nervous students accustomed to “txt”ing rather than writing with a pen on paper will scrawl a few near-illegible pages that we’ll have to first decipher before judging.)
What’s new this year is that I’ll be presenting. Exciting, but a bit scary. Last August I ran a few sessions at the WJEA’s Writes and Responsibilities conference, one of which could have gone much better. I hope–and expect–this to go much better. I’ve decided to stray from my usual design-themed topics and deal with the interpersonal. I’ve adapted a presentation I gave to technology workers at the UW’s College of Engineering based on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. This time, the presentation is called How to Win Staff and Influence Interviewees. Yeah, a bit of a stretch, I know. I’ll post it with my summary of how the day went in a few weeks.
UPDATE: I didn’t write a follow-up on the day, but I did want to post my handout: How to Win Staffs and Influence Interviewees. I hope it’s useful to young journalists out there.
If you’ve not read this book, you really should. It’s short and many summaries are available on the web. It really changed how I interact with people personally and professionally. It’s been most useful in dealing with people professionally, though. Winning people to my way of thinking and liberal use of people’s names goes a long way.
