NASHVILLE, Tennessee–In an era where hard copy newspapers are shrinking in size and, in many cases, disappearing from the scene entirely, the student journalists who form the Press Corps at the 65th Annual Youth In Government General Assembly held this week in Nashville are bucking the trend.
Led by Press Corps print editor Emeline Sharpe, the crew of nine student journalists are writing, producing, publishing and distributing at least one edition–and sometimes more–a day of The Ledger, a 6 to 8 page hard copy newspaper that documents the events making news at the conference.
The Tennessee Star spoke with Sharpe Friday afternoon at the temporary headquarters of the Press Corps in Hearing Room 4 of the Cordell Hull Building at the State Capitol to hear the behind-the-scenes details of this student-run media operation.
“I definitely couldn’t do it without everyone in the Press Corps. We have a bunch of members this year,” Sharpe told The Star.
“I work with InDesign” to produce the paper, she added.
“Thankfully, we have a format from years past, so the startup isn’t too bad. I go through Google Drive, and make sure there’s lots of organization and no one’s confused and all my articles are in the same place — they come from so many different people,” the Signal Mountain High School student said.
Sharpe added that after the newspaper is production ready “I create a PDF [file of the paper] and send it to the conference supervisors so they can make sure everything looks good, and then they print it off. We distribute a certain number of physical papers to the conference, and also upload it to the conference app, so everyone can see it.”
You can read Thursday’s edition of The Ledger for yourself here:
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