By Seow Kai Lun

IT MAY be the holiday season, but student reporters are still in class - though not in the classroom.

As part of the learning experience of The Straits Times Media Club, seven aspiring teenage journalists will be in Kuala Lumpur this week to visit the newsroom of The Star, a Malaysian daily tabloid newspaper.

They left yesterday for the three-day study trip, during which they will get to interact with reporters from The Star, as well as The Straits Times' Malaysia correspondent Carolyn Hong.

All students of secondary schools that subscribe to The Straits Times' IN magazine, they are also members of its student council working with the newspaper's full-time journalists on youth-related stories. They had to apply with their portfolios and were selected after an interview.

Preparation for the visit started on home ground.

Last Thursday, students sat in during the morning conference of Straits Times editors, something that Bukit View Secondary2 student Nasir Sadi, 14, found 'enlightening'.

'I now have a better understanding of how it all starts,' he said. It is during the morning conference that the day's top news stories are discussed.

They also attended a two-day Media Club camp last week, during which 109 students from 12 secondary schools picked up tips on interviewing celebrities and taking good photographs, among other things.

Mr Peter Khoo, head of The Straits Times' editorial projects unit, said: 'The trip will broaden their horizons and help them realise that journalism's purpose is to inform and educate, but that it can be done differently around the world.'

He added: 'We want to allow our young journalists to exchange ideas with other young readers. I am waiting to hear what they have to say about making the newspaper relevant to youths today.'

Beatty Secondary4 student Siti Aishah, 16, hopes to gain an insight into journalism in a different country.'I hope that will make me a better writer,' she said.

In previous years, students visited newsrooms in Beijing and Bangkok.

The Straits Times runs an international award-winning schools programme, which includes The Straits Times Media Club and its weekly magazines, IN and Little Red Dot.

The Media Club is recognised by the Ministry of Education as a co-curricular activity, and runs monthly journalism workshops for all schools that subscribe to at least 500 copies of The Straits Times, together with IN, each week.

The club also conducts training camps and overseas learning trips.

IN reaches secondary schools, while Little Red Dot is designed for primary school pupils. The two have a combined circulation of more than 130,000 across 185 schools islandwide.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on 15 Dec, 2008.