Welcome back to Letters From The Editors. This past Wednesday was quite the day for us, as we got to travel to the Kansas Scholastic Press Association Fall Conference at the University of Kansas. This annual conference is a haven for student journalists. Basically, it’s an entire day where upwards of 700 of us and our advisers get together to learn about anything and everything journalism related — writing, photography, design and, of course, web.

About two weeks ago, Habs asked us if we’d like to present a session about web journalism. Like the journalism nerds we are, we agreed to. And, we couldn’t’ve been more excited about it.

Once we decided we wanted to present the session, we had to get to work. First things first, we picked a fun name for our session — “By Web Geeks, For Web Geeks” — and Habs wrote a description of it and speaker biographies for us. We spent about a week putting together a Google Slides presentation and figuring out exactly what we wanted to teach other high school journalists about our publication and online journalism. The day before the conference, we even gave a mock presentation to Habs and a few staff members.

Once 10:50 a.m. on Wednesday rolled around, we finally got to present our session It lasted for 45 minutes, and we flew through content — talking about our production cycle, staff manual and policies, website redesign, multimedia reporting and social media accounts. At the end, we held a discussion over web and what works (and doesn’t work) for the students in our session’s online publications.

We might be a little bit biased here, but our session was pretty awesome. We had a turnout of about 25 people, and many of them seemed super interested in online journalism and what advice we had in that realm. After our session, we talked with a few of our “students,” and actually made a few friends. To say the least, it was a cool experience.

Lessons of the week:

J-Curt: For the past month or so, I’ve had no idea whether Jena and I were actually doing anything “right.” We had survived a few web weeks and organized web coverage for Homecoming week, but not without a lot of trial and error (emphasis on error) on our part. Teaching our session on Wednesday helped me see that we actually know what we’re doing — at least to the point where other student journalists and journalism advisers want to know our web advice. In a world of awesome student news websites like The Harbinger Online (Shawnee Mission East High School), HiLite Online (Carmel High School in Carmel, Indiana) and The Echo (St. Louis Park High School in St. Louis Park, Minnesota), it’s easy to lose track of how good of a website Mill Valley News is and can be. Not to sound conceited, but our Fall Conference session showed me that if we keep up what we’re doing, we have a ton of potential to be another awesome student news website this year.

Jena: While putting the actual presentation together was fun, and presenting was a great experience, actually talking to other journalism nerds after the presentation about their online publications was by far the most rewarding. The journalists and advisers that attended our session had lots of questions, and we had some for them. It was exciting to be able to discuss something I have so much passion for with other people that are a lot like me. No high school publication could do everything right and come up with all their own ideas. Though it doesn’t always feel like it, high school journalists are all connected, and we all need each other to grow. This applies to the “real world” as well. To sum it all up, teamwork makes the dream work.

That’s all… for now.

Seniors Justin “J-Curt” Curto and Jena Smith are the editors-in-chief of Mill Valley News online. They appreciate captioned photos, categorized and tagged stories, staff members who don’t text about web assignments at 11 p.m., teachers and students who talk about things they read on Mill Valley News and all things multimedia.