PV alumnus compares high school and college level journalism

As a journalism major at the University of Missouri, junior Katharine Roberts knows how to cover the hard topics.

In response to the racial tension at the college, she took pictures of the empty campus and wrote about how everything was closed for the citywide newspaper, the Missourian.

In addition, Roberts gathered the context and background for the articles so that the reporters only had to get the quotes for the important ones. She edited many stories and tweeted from the newspaper’s Twitter handle.

Currently, Roberts doesn’t write for a school newspaper, but she does take a class at school where she works between 20 and 25 hours a week working for the Missourian. In her class, the editors are teachers but the staff is made up of students. The writers are graded on multiple factors, but a major component of their grades are how easy their articles are to edit.

She prefers to write long form articles, however, which are longer and contain more information than a typical news article.

Roberts wrote for The Smoke Signal when she attended Pascack Valley. Being a journalist at the college level, she says, is extremely different than it was in high school.

“I’m on call 24/7,” Roberts said.

One of the most important aspects of the interview process as a college student is bonding with your sources in order to get them to expose more information. However, in addition to collecting the information, there is a lot of fact checking involved.

“You have to be a lot more invested in order to get credibility,” Roberts said.

On the other hand, she stated that the social media aspect of journalism is similar between the high school and college level journalism because self-representation and self-censorship play an important role in both.

The relationships between students and their teachers at PV is also similar to her relationships with her professors at MU.

Roberts reflected on her time here at PV and said that she felt that PV helped prepare her for college. Laptops in class especially helped her for what she is doing now.

Her fondest memory of high school was Valley Cup.

When she isn’t writing, Roberts enjoys going to the gym to keep up with her mental health.

Additionally, she is in a sorority and two honor societies, and participates in Relay for Life and other community service projects.