As a journalism student, I can confirm that scholastic journalism is essential to all schools, and Highlands is no exception. Our online article, the Hilltopper, keeps students updated on anything going on inside and outside of the school.

There are  many who benefit from our work. My parents enjoy seeing their kids featured in articles and being able to stay updated with everything inside the life of their teenagers.

Fellow students enjoy reading about any new updates in Highlands and teachers like that they can stay up to date with their pupils. It’s fun to flip through old year books that the journalism students painstakingly worked on, to see your classmates when they were younger and old friends who have since graduated. But of course, one of the people benefiting most from the Hilltopper are the journalists themselves.

Before we get into the more technical parts of journalism, the work, the experiences and freedoms, there’s another part to remember. Journalism, it’s fun. Yes, it’s a lot of work, but there are more enjoyable parts as well. There’s partnerwork and free seating and class parties for every holiday and- well it’s a lot of freedom. It’s also a lot of self discipline, which gets us into the difficulties of journalism.

There are many challenges to being a student journalist, the work is time consuming, stressful, and often slow, but the benefits outweigh the difficulties. Journalism is as close to a job as most classes get, teaching you time management, patience, and responsibility. While I’m clearly starting to make this sound unenjoyable, I mean, I basically called Journalism a class where you do a difficult job without getting paid, I promise it’s a lot more fun than that.

While journalism may be difficult, you are the one who controls just how hard it can be. You pick if you write articles, and what those articles are about, or if you want to take pictures for yearbook or photo galleries, you pick what pictures you take and  who you take them with.

What I’m saying is that journalism offers you a lot of freedom, when you write, you control the narrative. You have the creative freedom to tell a story exactly the way you think it should be told, and you’ll never forget the feeling that comes with posting your first article on the Hilltopper, or seeing your photo galleries out for all to see. Despite the struggles of being a journalist, you’ll find that it’s an experience to last a lifetime.