Fledgling journalists take flight

A rookie journalism advisor has brought a fresh start to Laguna Beach High School’s newspaper, The Brush and Palette.

Laguna High graduate Jim Brusky has returned to teach English and serve as newspaper advisor.

He saw the advisory position as an opportunity to stay close to the pulse of student life.

“I don’t like being isolated from the larger community,” he said. “This gives me direct access.”

The publication has had three advisors in the past three years, but students say Brusky’s more formalized take has energized them.

“We care about the paper a lot more this year,” Epstein said.

Despite being an alumnus, Brusky said the school is nothing like he remembered.

“I told parents on Back to School Night that it’s not even a trip down memory lane,” he said.

His preparation for his new post began long before the school year began.

Brusky joined Brush and Palette veterans (and now co-editors) Zoe Epstein and Masha Goncharova at a summer workshop at Cal State Long Beach.

While Brusky learned the ropes of advising the staff, Epstein took a layout class and Goncharova learned advanced editing.

He developed a detailed schedule and syllabus for the class, requiring that each student write, edit and sell advertisements.

Despite initial resistance from students, Brusky’s more organized approach has led to an improved final product.

“It was important for me as a teacher with no experience to learn the basics and hold them to those basics,” he said. “There’s a big focus on legitimizing the editing and the articles.”

When the staff’s first publication came out in October, Brusky led the class through an extensive postmortem, picking apart the paper.

“They discussed articles as a collective body,” Brusky said. “We’re working on our second issue, but the process already is exponentially improved. I couldn’t ask for a better group.”

“Last year was sort of informal,” Epstein said. “We learned as we went. This year, we had a few weeks of teaching before we started.”

She sees the year as a new beginning, with only four returning staff members out of a group of 12.

Sections in the paper include news, entertainment, features and opinion; Epstein hopes more students interested in athletics will join the staff in the future to beef up their sports coverage.

The staff is also much more focused on generating advertising sales; freshman Paige Watroba serves as business manager.

She said although her parents and other adults tell her that her newly-learned cold-calling and sales abilities will be a huge asset in her future career, she doesn’t see the benefit yet; she hopes to be a fashion writer.

While a low-tech white board holds story assignments and advertising leads, the staff “” which meets in the school’s state-of-the-art technology center “” uses current software to design their paper digitally.

Although he’s in his sixth year of teaching, Brusky fights to avoid complacency and strives for continuous improvement.

“My teaching already has undergone some radical changes,” he said. “We want our students to be lifelong learners, but we have to model that themselves.”