News Writing

This story was the product of two events I’d covered less than a week apart – a Team Trump event featuring Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst among other speakers, and a Rock the Vote event with Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. I hadn’t originally planned to write a story, but I’d been sure to collect multiple interviews and record their speeches in case. This reporting came in handy later, making the writing process only a matter of organization and balancing perspective so as to be fair to all parties.

This was one of my favorite stories because I managed to capture an issue that students were actually passionate about. The Clarke County School District announced they were proposing to move middle and high school start times earlier, angering many of those in the student body. In this story, I captured that anger along with the voices of several teachers and a district press release in a timely manner -- the proposals were struck down due to the backlash.    

The story centered around U-Lead Athens, an organization dedicated toward helping provide access to higher education for underdocumented students in Georgia. Perseverance and adaptability were key, as three key interviews I did were conducted via Zoom or phone, while no current CCHS student was willing to go on the record with me about the program, forcing me to think critically about how to write the story without them.

CCHS hosted a CCSD Community Conversations event where district safety policies were the focus. I initially wrote the story as a basic event coverage, but with help from my adviser, I realized the actual "story": very few people attended for vital information. It took more work, but I pivoted and the story was better for it,

For the first time in half of a century, Clarke Central’s primary feeder middle school received a re-model. At the ribbon cutting, I was on hand to photograph and report on the event, interviewing several key stakeholders to gauge the various reactions to the event.

The key piece with this story, a standard news brief covering the district’s recognized faculty and support professionals, was speed. Within a couple hours of the press release, I’d called and interviewed the key stakeholders, making sure that the article could go up as soon as possible, effectively breaking the news to the public.