Week One: Title, Focus, Story Ideas—

We call ourselves The Blank Page staff. That is the name of our magazine, The Blank Page. If you were to see our magazine on a newsstand, would you get it? That we are starting the world of journalism over again, with a clean, blank page? Or would you be that cynical person with the greasy fingers—People magazine in one hand and a giant bag of Cheetos in the other—thinking, "Who would name a magazine The Blank Page, I don't get it!" If you identify with the latter, we're putting in a nice subhead just for you, even though we don't really want you reading our magazine anyway, if you don't even get the title.

The title is just one of the components we've had to consider in the "Tell It Like It Is" workshop, a series of journalism classes at 826. Number of sessions: four. The product: a full-length magazine produced by a group of middle and high school students. With this as our goal, even the first session transformed itself into an editorial meeting. Julie and Jim let us make all the decisions. This can be whatever you want it to be, they said.

We went around the room discussing just that, what we wanted the magazine to be. Slowly, person-by-person, a theme began to form: the unknown. We all, coincidentally, had just about the same vision—a magazine about little known things, the little people, ignored by mainstream media. A hobo who plays Christmas songs year round. A mysterious boy at school who, for a dollar, will tell you a joke about anyone or anything you ask him to.

After we understood the focus of the magazine, we brainstormed ideas for the title. The Little People. Through A Looking Glass. Unknown Celebrities. How I See It. A Teen Perspective. We shouted out titles and Jim wrote them down until the white board was filled and we had to erase the ones we didn't like. The Little People, we thought, sounds like it's about midgets. Through A Looking Glass, which actually was voted a close second to Blank Page, was already taken by an "adult" publication. Unknown Celebrities didn't cover our magazine's entire focus. How I See It, a bit trite. A Teen Perspective, a bit boring. So we concluded that The Blank Page best fit our publication. "It just works," someone said, "I don't know why, that's just how I feel. The Blank Page, it works."

If you like The Little People or Unknown Celebrities better, don't try to change our minds. "You have to pick a title and stick with it," Jim said, and he's been working as a journalist for two decades. That's what makes this class different from journalism courses offered in high school, the instructors' professional experience. Both Julie and Jim know what they're talking about; they're in the business, they know how a magazine is managed and they run the "Tell It Like It Is" workshop just like a mainstream publication. They talked about beats and different formats and how to write a captivating news story. And, by the time we left, we had our first assignment: come up with three story topics fitting The Blank Page focus, and be ready to defend your ideas in a cutthroat editorial conference the following week.

—Kevin Feeney