Institut Teknologi Bandung

This event was opened by Nenden Rina Ratnakomala, ST., MT., as the Head of Student Character Development Sub-Directorate (Ditmawa) ITB. Nenden said that in this digital era, everyone can be a journalist. "Let's hope that with this activity, younger students can gain new knowledge and experiences that will be useful in the future," Nenden said, ending her remarks.

The next session presentation was delivered by Adi Marsiela, a journalist with years of experience. He started his session by explaining the definition of news. News is a report of an event or a fact that occurred. Then he proceeded to explain about reporting technique, which is a way to extract information. According to him, to effectively gather information, we need to use our senses, especially hearing.

"Listening is a very important part of the reporting technique because people usually prefer to talk rather than to listen, thus we are more likely to get a sensitive news that will be read by many people through listening to a conversation," explained Adi which once was a chairman of Independent Journalist Association (AJI) Bandung. According to him, a journalist needs to have the ability to obtain initial information. This is needed so that we can ask the right questions based on that information.

The next presentation was writing and editing techniques. He urged not to use a metaphor and passive sentence in news writing. In addition to that, it is best to write in compact sentence and to avoid redundant sentences. If there is an Indonesian word for it, we should not use a foreign language.

Writing ideas can come from anywhere. There are many topics that we can turn into a piece of news. "If you want to look for an idea, start from things that are close to us, such as school tasks, friendship, etc.," said Adi.

After the presentation session from Adi Marseila was completed, the event continued to a question and answer session. In this session, a participant asked Adi how to get a lot of readers as a beginner writer. "You should first determine the direction of your news, ask your friends and family or the people that are close to you to read your article, also try to make your news article as attractive as possible," he replied.

The session was ended by a handover of a digital souvenir to Adi Marseila by Nenden. Then it was followed by a documentation session together with the training participants and a closing session.

Reporter: Kevin Agriva Ginting (Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering, 2020)
Translator: Favian Aldilla R (Civil Engineering, 2019)