By: Chloe Werner

As a student interested in someday pursuing a career in journalism, this camp experience was overall an exciting taste of real-world reporting, with opportunities to practice interviews, writing, grooming articles, and producing multimedia pieces. 

One of the most exciting things for me was getting to spend time interacting with real reporters, news anchors, and journalism professors. That was why our visit to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette was so inspiring for me; it gave me a taste of what the workspace and daily life was of a journalist, a life I hope to have someday.

In our visit, we walked down to the Post Gazette and were ushered inside by Mike Fouco, a longstanding journalist for the newspaper. He gave us a tour of the office space. The walls were plastered with newspaper snippets and photographs, and a circle of television sets broadcasted from a multitude of news channels on the ceiling. He then brought us to a meeting room and took some time to explain where his career path had led him, and the different opportunities that lay in the world of media.

Both Mr. Fouco’s stories and those of other journalists who we met throughout the course of this program, were able to solidify the idea of what it means to be a journalist in our minds. Our tour of Post Gazette invigorated the sense that the reason for journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and it a job fulfilled with a passion to do what is right.