New journalism course helps students become reporters and writers

This year for the first time, Archbishop Carroll has offered a journalism course that allows students to write creative stories for The Carroll Times and to create content for the school yearbook. The class was created and is taught by Mrs. Diane Gimpel, an English teacher at Carroll.

The students in journalism class publish stories in The Carroll Times, which is the school’s online newspaper, and they work together to complete the Legacy yearbook. 

“My favorite thing about the class is filling the newspaper and the yearbook with what the journalism students created,” said Mrs. Gimpel, “I am so proud of what they do and I love being able to showcase it for the Carroll community.”

Instead of students writing stories and creating the yearbook as extracurriculars, Gimpel developed and pitched to have a journalism class so that the newspaper could have consistent content for the Carroll community to read. 

“I’m glad that we had more content in the newspaper than we had last year when there was no journalism class,” said Mrs. Gimpel, “The class meets regularly and has regular deadlines, so the newspaper has been able to publish more stories than it was able to do when it operated on an extracurricular basis.”

In writing The Carroll Times, the students are taught to act as journalists by interviewing different students and faculty members about different topics that are happening in the community.

“My favorite part about journalism class is that it allowed me to interact with more people than I normally would have,” said Anna Winslow, junior.

The journalism class contains seven students, which allows for Gimpel to help them grow as writers individually. At the beginning of the year, the students had limited knowledge about writing stories that followed the format of journalistic stories. Further into the year, the students were able to learn how to write and format their stories for readers to enjoy. 

“I like that our journalism class is small because I feel like it really helps us figure things out together,” said Kelly Fowler, senior.