Mesa Legend editors mentor next generation of journalists at Model UN
Mesa Legend editors mentored dozens of local high school students during the annual valley-wide Model UN conference in February as part of the world press delegation.
The student-led event took place on Feb. 13 and 14 with an aim to give high schoolers the opportunity to learn journalistic skills such as interviewing, photography, writing and editing while they each represented different global media outlets with over twice the number of students compared to past years.
The students traversed the campus searching for delegates to interview, events to report on and captured important moments using various multimedia methods. The journalists would then reconvene in the Mesa Legend newsroom to compile the gathered information into news articles and social media posts before hurrying out to find the next big story.
Dr. Brian Dille, a political science professor at Mesa Community College and Model UN organizer for 27 years, shared his thoughts on the size of the World Press delegation as well as its new structure for this year’s convention.
“It’s possible that this year could have been a complete disaster because I wasn’t around in the fall to get them organized and it wasn’t,” Dille said. “For the world press, we redesigned it to be much more of a real journalism experience, and less a sort of fantasy land, which had kind of the case of previous years. And so, I think the students really responded to that. We had more students sign up to be world press delegates than we’ve ever had before.”
Not every student involved was a reporter running around campus, as Minsoo Kim the Undersecretary General of Media and Outreach proved. Kim worked in the newsroom alongside the Mesa Legend editors to provide guidance and parameters for the students and their work, but still learned alongside them despite her veteran status.
“I learned that communication is so, so important, especially when you’re managing a huge conference like this, and there’s so many different committees, and there’s so many delegates that you have to take care of and not enough people in the leadership group to account for everybody … because there’s just so much going on,” shared Kim.
Communication became a challenge for the World Press delegation during the convention, as faculty, Legend editors, student chairs and student participants all had different ideas of what needed to be accomplished and how. Despite these obstacles, every party involved came together to create a successful simulated working newsroom.
Some of those redesigns came in the form of an internal newspaper, where Legend editors posted edited long form articles written by students as well as a social media clone where posts were made promoting the long form articles, all written by the student journalists. It remains unclear if others attending the conference had access to these platforms or if they were strictly for the World Press delegation’s internal use.
“It’s a way to better understand the world and international relations, because the media landscape in the world is constantly changing, and different outlets from around the world approach reporting in different ways,” explained Dille when speaking on the importance of the World Press delegation. “So, by taking the viewpoint of an outlet that’s not American, it’s a way for them to try to understand both what’s happening in the world, but also the way people understand it, and how that changes from place to place.”
