Newtown Students Experience A Day At The New York Times

By Larissa Lytwyn

For sisters Margot and Alexandra Isaacs, both aspiring writers, the opportunity to visit the offices of The New York Times proved to be an exciting story in itself.

Alexandra, a Newtown High School sophomore, was encouraged by boyfriend David Green to attend “Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day” with his mother, New York Times layout editor Lisa Green, on April 22.

The day is part of a nationally recognized program founded by the Ms Foundation, a feminist activist group, in which parents and family friends can bring children ages 8 and up to explore the modern-day workplace.

This year’s theme was “Today’s Vision, Tomorrow’s Reality,” reflecting the foundation’s goal to broaden how our nation’s future men and women can balance the challenges of career and, if they choose, family.

“While I’d been to The New York Times to meet David, I had never gone to the office for something like this,” said Alexandra, who met David, a Long Island resident, at a summer camp a few years ago.

Alexandra said she has always loved reading and writing. She currently writes book reviews for the school newspaper, The Hawkeye.

“I love the ‘chick-lit’ genre,” she said. “But I like to mix it up with more [serious] pieces, too.” Her favorite reads include Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella and Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding.

To write for The Hawkeye, Alexandra had to formally apply, completing an application and submitting pieces of writing to the newspaper’s advisor, English teacher Nicole Rossi.

“The Hawkeye is a good high school-level paper,” Alexandra said. While working on The Hawkeye, she learned how to write news leads, delineate between different types of stories, and explore principals and ethics in the journalism field.

The New York Times had a specialized “Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day” curriculum; visitors chose from four all-ages courses that interested them.

“I really enjoyed the journal writing course,” said Alexandra. “I learned how to really make [my writing] my own!”

She described the atmosphere at The New York Times as friendly and down-to-earth.

“Everyone was very accessible,” she said.

Recently, Alexandra was appointed The Hawkeye’s entertainment editor for next fall. “I’m excited,” she said. “I will get to cover all kinds of topics within the arts, from books to music to movies.”

Her New York Times experience, she said, further inspired her writing ambitions. This summer, she will be attending a writing seminar at Duke University in Chapel Hill, N.C.

She also applied for a high school-aged writing workshop this fall at Yale University in New Haven.

“I don’t know [exactly] when I find out whether or not I got in,” she said.

Her sister, sixth grader Margot, is a writer for Reed Intermediate School’s newspaper. She describes herself as an avid reader.

Like her sister, many of the pieces Margot submits to her school newspaper are book reviews.

“I love the book Devil’s Arithmetic [by Jane Yolen],” she said. The book is about the trials of Polish Jewish citizens struggling to survive Europe’s World War II-era Holocaust camps.

The sisters described the Times’ main newsroom as a collection of spacious cubicles, with larger, closed-in offices for the newspaper’s editors.

The walls are lined with some of the Times’ award-winning photography, said Alexandra.

Margot described how the “morgue” (the newspaper archives) was separated by section, from the Arts and Metro sections to weekly specials on fashion and other subjects.

“It was all pretty organized,” she said.

While Alexandra knew both the structure of the newsroom and the newspaper itself, the experience was a largely new one for Margot.

One of Margot’s favorite classes was “Journalism 101.”

“We learned how to write leads and learned what different types of [news] stories there are,” she said.

Another class allowed students to interact with some of the Times’ photojournalists.

“One of the [photojournalists] was in Iraq during the beginning of the Iraqi war,” said Margot. “He discussed the ethics of taking pictures of war, and he talked about some of the things he saw, the people he met.”

While Margot isn’t sure which kind of writing she would like to do, she definitely wants to be “an author.”

Being at The New York Times, she said, taught her more about news writing.

Alexandra agreed. “It was a great, hands-on experience,” she said. “It was very well organized.”