Newspaper Reflection

My group wrote our articles about the final Lincoln-Douglas debate, The Alton debate. It mostly covered topics of their previous debates so we could search for their opinions on a topic from more than one debate if we had to. Some of the topics were hard to find pictures for, such as The Dred Scott case, the only ones I could find were current books or a front of a movie.

All of my group members got their articles done on time so I wasn't worried about missing the deadline. The only problem was none of the group members had any experience in the program we were using for the layout and design. I was worried that we would have a lot problems, but thanks to some of the other classmates for helping we didn't have to worry about not knowing how to do something on the program. Although I am not completely satisfied with how the newspaper turned out I am happy with how I contributed to the final product.

We had extra space on the layout once we had posted the images and articles so I researched some other things that were going on in 1858. I wanted to find the weather or find if there were any criminals wanted at the time, but what I found was the Tom Ball. It was a gun that was coming out and I wrote about the guns features and how it looked.

For future projects similar to this I would like to contribute more to the layout and design than I did in this project. One thing learned while making my article that the more critiques you get from different people the more perspectives you will get and maybe someone will notice a mistake no one else saw. I also learned that having an action verb in your headlines is very helpful, it catches peoples attention and having a short and to the point lede help keep the readers attention.

Some of the group members had a hard time getting along, there were also some that weren't staying on track some of the time. I did everything I could to help and am glad of my contributions I made to the final product and in the end I liked the experience and how the newspapers came out.