Day Nine: Opinions form on the page

By Liz Sanchez, June 18, 2019

This morning was nice. The sun was out, but finally it wasn’t hot anymore; I woke up bright and ready to start my day at Mosaic.

When I arrived at the newsroom and got the daily newspaper from Sal [Pizarro], he taught us a new word that I had personally never heard of before: spadea. I saw that the paper had a half-page ad that wrapped around the back, which turns out to be a spadea — something cool and new I got to learn. I also learned that the majority of people hate them for some reason.

A few minutes after that, Joe [Rodriguez] gave us a lecture about how to create an opinion piece. We got to throw crumpled-up papers at him, which was a fun moment (even though I completely missed). His interesting lecture stuck with me because he put the different aspects of creating an opinion piece into three different categories: the good, the bad and the ugly.

After typing out the ideas for my upcoming opinion piece, I showed Sal my top three and we agreed that I should write about the death penalty.

After eating lunch, I strolled back to campus and sat down on a bench in the shade, a shining view of the water fountains in the middle of the grass. It got me thinking about how nice of a day it was outside, and even though it was over 80 degrees, that’s nothing compared to when it was about 100 degrees last week.  

For the rest of the day, I worked on editing my second story and mapping out the opinion piece that I’m creating soon.

Even though I was unable to make it to the San Francisco trip, which I heard was the highlight of the whole program, I’m having a good experience nonetheless. I’m looking forward to reading the stories of my peers at the end, which will likely be the highlight for me.