Work hard. Play hard.

By Stephanie Ramirez (Somerville, MA)

I’ve never worked in a newsroom. But if it’s half as fun as the SJP one, I’m sure newsrooms and I will become best friends.

Thanks to SJP, I’ve visited three newsrooms. They were interesting, to say the least, but quiet, which was perfect for accommodating working journalists. But not SJP journalists.

The students of the Princeton University Summer Journalism Program don’t need silence. In fact, they can’t deal with silence. They type loudly, they scream across the room, blast music, and when the pressure is too much, they throw ten-minute dance parties. I can’t picture the CNN broadcasters dancing to Edge of Glory to relieve their stress or the journalists at the New York Times playing Michael Jackson mid-article.
We were asked to be quiet – extremely quiet – when we were in the professional newsrooms.

But guess what? The journalists who host the dance parties, who can talk AND write, who don’t need silence and can still produce a newspaper on time – those are the quality journalists.

PSJP, we get things done. We write articles and we have fun while doing it.