From the initial nervous introductions on the first day, it was evident to every participant: they were not going to be alone. There were connections aplenty among the participants at Berkeley’s 2006 version of the ASNE High School Journalism Institute.

Keynote speaker David Zeeck noticed it. The current ASNE president and executive editor of The News Tribune in Tacoma, Wash., smiled as participants introduced themselves. As if he were winding strings around colorful pushpins stuck into an imaginary U.S. map, Zeeck seemed to be having fun.

Yep, been there, Zeeck said after teacher Kristi Piper mentioned that she had taught inmates at Huntsville Prison in Texas. Zeeck had attended their prison rodeo. When advisor Cheryl Ashton mentioned that she teaches at Fort Wayne, Ind., Zeeck chimed in again. Zeeck has relatives in nearby Calumnet City.

Connect, connect, connect -- the strings began to crisscross.

Samatha Sage, beginning adviser at the Navajo Preparatory School in Farmington, New Mexico, knew of Portia Bookhart’s high school in Washington, D.C. Sage had tutored elementary students in Southeast D.C. when she lived in Greenbelt, Md., with her fiancé.

Sage also knew Ben Everson’s high school in Longmont, Colo., because she had attended graduate school at the University of Colorado, in nearby Boulder. “I worked in Longmont,” Sage recalled, smiling wryly. “It was the only job I could find.” There was another connection between Sage and Zeeck. “Where he’s from is where my parents went to college,” Sage said, noting that Wayland Baptist University is in Plainview, Texas.

Jeff Youde, an adviser in Quilcene High School in Washington, earned his Master’s in Education from Northern Arizona University, and worked at a reservation school in rural Arizona, at Hopi High School, well known to Sage.

But incidental geographical connections weren’t what mattered most to the 35 participants at the 2006 Berkeley ASNE seminar. It was the commonality of the daunting task ahead.

Holly Day, adviser at Mill Creek High School in Hoschton, Ga., recalled her feelings that first morning as she listened to her fellow ASNE participants talk about their situations. She was “shocked,” she said, to hear that so many others were also first year advisers. “I really felt relieved that there were so many other people in the same boat as I was,” she recalled. The tasks ahead can be intimidating, she said: grading student stories, organizing stories, organizing the paper, graphics, getting the kids excited about the craft, trying to gauge the reactions of parents and administrators to the kinds of stories kids really want to write. Yet those were the strongest connections, she said. “So to find a whole group that has to do what you have to do, it helps you feel bonded to them,” Day explained.

Another bond for participants was the fact that all felt that the seminars helped immensely. Seminars in libel law and censorship in particular were a godsend for Jan Goodspeed, who is beginning her sixth year teaching journalism at North Monterey (Calif.) High School. She recalled how she felt her first year especially: “I have the answers in English (class). I don’t in journalism.” For example, when one or two students wanted to include profanities in their articles, she recalled, she simply didn’t have the ready answer, the requisite knowledge of student press law. “So I didn’t have any bite to my claim” that they should desist, she recalled. Now, after hearing first-hand from Mark Goodman, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center, she feels she has plenty of teeth.