Reflection of the Newspaper Project

Here is a link to a revised copy of the newspaper.

Reflection:

          Our newspaper project was about the Lincoln Douglas debates. We were supposed to make a newspaper front page telling the story about a specific debate that we were pre-assigned. The debate that we were assigned was the 4^th debate, the one that took place in Charleston.

          My role in this project was, in a sense, the editor in chief. What I did was organize who was doing what story, and then put it in to the paper. Along the way I helped out some people on what to research and helped edit everyones paper.

          The good things that I feel like I accomplished with this project was that I kept everyone on task and punctual with their articles, so we had plenty of relaxing time in the end where some others did not have it. Another good thing was that I was one of the two groups of people that put a newspaper esque background texture, which really pulled the paper together and made it stand out from all of the other papers. The texture also did not hinder the reader in their reading capabilities because of flaws in the texture, like the other paper with a background texture did. I also organized the paper such as a real legitimate paper quite nicely and I feel like it really shows off my talents, as well as flaws, which I will explain in the next paragraph.

          The problems that I had with this project were all based off of me not looking at the final product well enough after “finishing” it. The biggest flaw that I still had in it was a border around a text box that ended up cutting through a pull quote, which is a huge mistake on my part and could have been easily solved if I had just looked over the project one last time. Another thing which isn't much of a flaw is that there was a caption under the first image on the top half of the front page, and I feel like it is a bit too pushed away from the image, and should be pushed more toward the image to more legitimize the paper, as far as looks go.

          I did more than just edit and put the paper together. Another thing that I did for this paper was search for images of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglass, and help make headlines for the stories with another member of the group. A lot of the work was really laid back, with resources such as pod casts not needing a lot of attention to understand, it was really easy to do research on the subject. Picture searching was also simple, but it was sometimes a little difficult to find an image someone else did not already find yet. Since there aren't very many pictures of Stephen Douglass on the internet, I ended up as one of the 3 or 4 groups that had the same picture of him, but I did end up with a completely original picture of Abraham Lincoln in my article.