Imagine meeting Pulitzer Prize winning writers and photographers, living on the Stony Brook campus for a week, and learning from the best of the best how to eat, breathe, and live journalism. For one week this summer, sophomore Reid Rubio will participate in the Robert W. Greene Summer Institute for High School Journalists at Stony Brook University with at least 15 other high schoolers from all over Long Island.

“It’s basically a program where you take a week out of your summer and you go into more details about the journalism field. Both writing journalism and broadcast journalism are included in the program. You learn how to interview people correctly, how to use the camera, and how to write scripts,” said Reid. The program was the last wish of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and editor, Robert W. Greene.

Greene did a number of things, including founding the nation’s first permanent newspaper investigative team at Newsday in 1967, working as the assistant managing editor of Newsday for 38 years, teaching at Hofstra University until 2003, and much more. He also received many different awards including the Pulitzer Prize, three national public-service awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, two National Headliner Awards, two Front Page Awards, two Deadline Club Awards, and many other awards from different universities across the country.

So, obviously Greene was a major defining force in the journalism field and the Greene program will definitely help mold aspiring young journalists into the award-winning journalists we hope them to be.

This program, which has been around since 2009, has had many teenagers from all over the island participate. Last year junior Emma Galasso participated in the program and she said, “My experience at the program was unforgettable. Not only did I make friends that I still continue to talk to today, I learned so many things about the world of journalism. I went into the program thinking I knew everything there was about journalism, yet I ended up learning more than I knew before!”

Emma and Ms. Phillips Mett, the Journalism and Broadcast Journalism teacher, both encouraged Reid to take part in the program. “Actually, the man who did the accepting process told me I was accepted because he thought I had a lot of potential from watching some of my past packages for the Hurricane Watch,” Reid said.

From Emma’s recount of her experience the program sounds amazing. “I was able to work with Pulitzer Prize winning photographer John Conrad Williams and was able to meet Newsday Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Walt Handelsman. Working in the newsroom and the broadcast studio, getting to cover a LI Ducks game, and collaborating with other high schoolers that share my passion was incredible,” she said.

Hopefully Reid will enjoy the program as much as she did and gain all he hopes to from the program. “I want to better my knowledge using editing software such as Final Cut Pro from people who know a lot more than I do and also learn camera angles to make an interview more interesting to the audience,” he said.

For anyone else that is interested in the field of journalism get involved now; it’s so much fun and gives you a great opportunity to get to know people – especially people that you knew nothing about before. Whether it’s broadcast or just regular journalism, take the opportunity now to find out if it is your passion. Emma puts it perfectly, “I love delivering news. I’ve always pictured myself sitting at a news desk and delivering the news to someone sitting in their living room. You can impact so many people through whatever type of journalism it is, and I just have so much respect for everyone in the field.”