Los Gatos Weekly-Times

While most of the student newspapers are delivered to classes, some are mailed to subscribers. Nancy Kim (left), Doug Stillinger and Alexa Schloh help sort the paper for distribution.

Reporters take pulse of campus, community from Room 16

By Shari Kaplan

The bell rings, proclaiming the start of sixth period at Los Gatos High School. The halls are now quiet and the flurry of activity is over as students settle into their seats for another hour of instruction.

Except, of course, for some 25 journalists congregating upstairs in room 16 of the main building. Some sit on the floor in circles, chatting and chuckling. Some filter into the adjacent computer room, eager to get their hands on one of several new Macintoshes to type up stories. Still others sit comfortably on top of desks, surveying the activities in the rest of the room.

These are the staffers of El Gato, the school's newspaper, and although their surroundings may not resemble a professional newsroom, the product they put out once every three (occasionally four) weeks is a thick, professionally sized paper filled with campus, community and world news, features, entertainment, surveys, sports and tell-it-like-it-is opinion and editorial pages.

Jeff Mount, who has served as El Gato teacher/adviser for two years and is also a freshman English teacher, calls being on staff a "trial by fire," as the school offers no prerequisite classes in newswriting.

However, he adds, anyone taking the class is obviously self-motivated and has a definite proclivity for language and writing.

"This is no dumping-ground elective course. This is the cream of the crop of good communicators at the school. I love working with this level of students because they're bright, funny and have wit," Mount says.

"I can trust them to make this a student-run endeavor. I never presume to tell them what to print or how to lay things out; I make 'recommendations.' Sometimes I do sort of push for things, though," he adds, explaining that in his position as adviser he may require rewrites of grammatically poor articles or ask that awkward page layouts be reworked.

As a "watchdog of decency," he says he also must intercede once in a while when libel or poor-taste issues come up. For instance, he remembers censoring a list created by two staffers on the top 10 reasons to recycle because parts of the text made allusions to drinking and smoking marijuana. When he does step in, he says students do not give him a hard time because "they know all along that I respect their efforts, and I'm not unreasonable."

What Mount does stress is OAR--objectivity, accuracy and responsibility--an acronym he created for the three tenets he believes most important for writers paddling through the world of journalism, be they beginners or seasoned veterans.

Among those paddlers are seniors Ben Freda and Luc Morris, co-editors-in-chief of the 1995-96 El Gato with three years of experience between them.

Freda joined the staff as a sophomore, when he served one semester as opinion/editorial editor and the other as editor of The Center, a two-page spread on various special topics and features. As a junior, he became sports editor, the same year Morris came on as op/ed editor. All editors are also responsible for writing articles.

"I wanted to write something and see it go to press and have an article that everyone would read," Morris says of his inspiration to join El Gato. Freda remembers joining because "it sounded fun" and because a friend of his, who later dropped the class, was supposed to be on staff with him.

Although they will probably major in other subjects, both Freda and Morris have enjoyed the El Gato experience so much that they plan on writing for the newspapers of whatever colleges they attend.

"Working with other people is challenging and also very rewarding. I never go home before it gets dark, but it's fun to be here," Morris says, adding that one of his favorite aspects of the class is seeing the final product, which does not always look the way the editors intended.

Morris recalls that at the beginning of this school year he and Freda had to trash some section editors' layouts and repaginate the paper because the pages were not ready by deadline. This led to an ultimatum that never needed repeating: everyone quickly got used to the rigors of the three-week publishing cycle.

Freda says he hates when he and Morris have to "yell at people" because those people are also friends, but, as co-editors-in-chief, they have to put their foot down on procrastination.

As for himself, Freda is willing to put everything else on the back burners to make room for El Gato. When deadlines loom and he is helping to edit copy and lay out pages, he finds himself losing sleep, falling behind on homework and--yes--even cutting classes sometimes.

"Ironically, I don't push very hard, yet this becomes their number-one concern. It's because of the pressure I know they bear that I want to run this course with some latitude," Mount says.

Because so much time is taken up with evaluating past issues, brainstorming for new issues and actual interviewing, photographing, writing, editing and layout, Mount does not always have as much instruction time as he would like. He does, however, manage to slip in abridged lessons on such grammatical and stylistic topics as changing passive-voice sentences to active voice, tightening up wordy passages and including the most important information early in an article.

"This isn't like any other class I've taken," Freda says. " The fact that it's called a class amazes me.

"It's nothing like doing papers and taking tests!" Freda adds. "I like the late evenings from 5 to 11 p.m. when everyone's all stressed out. It's like a bunch of friends get together and put out a newspaper."

Perhaps the staff's most infamous late-night amusement was the chair luge, in which the young journalists sat in chairs and shot down the ramps that connect the high school's various levels. An administrative request put an end to the lugeing, but the memory lives on.

One of the few things on which Freda does not look back fondly is the lesson he learned from an embarrassing slip-up that somehow sneaked into a story of his. Last year, he was finishing up an article and had only to insert a few quotations from teacher Rocky Maramonte. To mark where he wanted the quotes to go, Freda typed "blah blah blah." His insertions never did make it into the published version of the story--only his "blahs."

Jen Shirey, one of the sophomores who make up the majority of the current El Gato staff, has noticed the same camaraderie of which Freda and Morris speak, even though this is her first year on staff. Last semester's entertainment co-editor, who now does sports and feature writing, Shirey says she often finds herself not wanting to leave the classroom at the end of the school day.

"We're like one big family. And I've met people in this class who I otherwise might not have met," she says, referring to the cross-section of students' ages, academic and social standings and journalistic fortés.

Shirey joined El Gato because she aspires to be a sports commentator. She says she's heard the profession is difficult for women to break into unless they are coaches, good players or good journalists. Although she has not decided upon a college major yet, she considers being active in journalism an effective stepping stone.

The most anxious moment of her still-young career occurred earlier this year, when she was covering her first boys' basketball game. She says she was nervous about talking to the players and later worried about what readers would think of the way she wrote.

"I thought, 'If I'm not good at this, there goes my career!' " Shirey recalls. She did fine.

Senior and sports co-editor Brian Toy's biggest concern lies not in the writing process, but in the interviewing. He says he enjoys talking to people but often ponders about the quantity and quality of his questions. "Sometimes it's difficult to phrase a question so you get the right responses," he explains.

Pondering may come in handy for him, though, as he is interested in philosophy and is considering a college major in that field.

"It's a great experience in terms of the time you get to spend with people and the friendships you make. And it makes your writing a lot more clear," Toy says he would tell perspective El Gato staffers. "I enjoy being able to hang out with intellectual people who also know how to have fun."

Mount recognizes this balance of responsibility and diversion and says he is proud of the paper the El Gato confreres publish so well with so little experience in the world of journalism.

"At the start of the year, it feels like total wet cement. But by the end of the year, they've really grown into it," he says.

Morris sums up the experience with a grin: "We hang things from the ceiling, did the chair luge, celebrate Mentos [fruit candies], hang out, stress out--oh, and we produce a snazzy paper, too!"