6th Annual Summer Journalism Workshop 

June 11-19, 2009

The Oklahoma Institute for Diversity in Journalism offers an annual workshop for promising high school students, scheduled early each summer. The program is funded by several organizations including the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, the Oklahoman, the Tulsa World, and the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication at OU. Its goal is to expose youth to careers in the world of daily journalism. OIDJ’s mission is to provide opportunities for students who would otherwise lack access to journalism training or who face other barriers to pursuing careers in journalism.  

Fourteen high school students completed work in June 2008 on the fifth annual edition of the Red Dirt Journal, the OIDJ newspaper and its broadcast component. Publication of the paper and the newscast are the capstone projects of the in-residence program. An online website component to the project is also included.

Students report, write, edit and shoot photos for stories on a variety of topics and news events. The students stay in a dormitory on the University of Oklahoma campus. Previous participants have taken field trips that included a tour of the Oklahoman and a local television station. They have shadowed journalists there for one afternoon in order to get first-hand exposure to daily journalism.

In addition to their intensive training sessions, student have been treated to presentations by the Society of Professional Journalists, Freedom of Information Oklahoma, the Norman Transcript, the Oklahoma Gazette, the Oklahoman, the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.