The copy of Edwardsville's local newspaper that my mom has kept tucked away in our kitchen for the past month.
media literacy
While, as a weekly and quarterly publication, we rarely get the chance to "break" news, we owe it to our community to use our platforms to share information responsibly. Even if it can sometimes be difficult to get our newspapers in the hands and on the screens of our student body, I do everything I can to make sure that, for those who do read our work, the news we publish is trustworthy.
WHEN EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT
As I talked about in my media law + ethics section, when it's time for our staff to come together and plan our budget for the week, our story ideas are often inspired by the things we overhear our classmates saying. This is especially true when it comes to issues concerning our school, like the lawsuit I covered in my junior year. This year, after class discussions, my classmates have written about things like potential new construction and the return of controversial tardy policies.
By the time we're able to publish pieces about these topics, they've usually spread around the school by word-of-mouth. Our goal as student journalists, then, is to respond to the hearsay with facts. Whether this means speaking to school officials, conducting research or gauging student opinions in a neutral way, we work to make our publication a trustworthy place to find out what the real story is behind the thing everyone seems to be talking about.
WHEN NO ONE IS
After 18-or-so months full of COVID creeping into nearly everything a high school newspaper could write about, our community was able to get enough of a handle on the situation to let our publication return, for the most part, to normal. By the time I started my second year of AJC, writing a "COVID piece" was a novel concept.
It was exactly that --- how little COVID seemed to be impacting the lives of those around me at that point --- that I wanted to write about. I found the opportunity when the Biden administration announced that it would be letting its COVID-era emergency declarations expire. As a chronically ill student, the pandemic had never left my mind, but I knew that wasn't the case for most people. Using a recent news event as my anchor, I wanted to how attitudes and precautions had changed over the months, particularly because I didn't see anyone around me calling attention to the idea.
my media diet
Sometimes it feels like the only publications I have time to read are my own. But in order to be an informed citizen --- and find story ideas --- I spend a fair amount of time making sure my "media diet" contains a variety of reliable outlets.
My preferred news sources are: the Washington Post, the AP, U.S. News and World Report, NPR and .gov websites. I also subscribe to the New York Times' email notifications so I can be alerted of breaking news and get story ideas as events are unfolding.
My family subscribes to our local newspaper, the Edwardsville Intelligencer, and I've made a habit of flipping through its pages to see if there's anything going on in our community that would make a good story topic. Or, if there's something more pressing, I'll occasionally check their website to see how certain local issues are being talked about. I also try to frequently check other local news outlets, like Alton's Riverbender, STL Today or the St. Louis NPR station.
On my personal Instagram account, I follow several news outlets (some of which I have displayed in the gallery above). While seeing these stories in my feed can help me find story ideas, I also use their posts as design inspiration. Particularly with the Washington Post, I take note of the way these outlets visually present their stories to their social media audience, hoping to get a better idea of how I can use Instagram to increase our publication's reach.
For non-news pieces, I tend to uncover story ideas from conversations with my peers, but I'm no stranger to exploring other schools' publications. My journalism teacher encourages us to read pieces from and peruse the websites of other school publications, and while the schools we look at often have much larger staffs than us, our class is able to take lessons from their work and stay competitive with bigger programs. Though my goal isn't to find story ideas, I often look at newspapers from nearby schools or browse the sites of award-winning schools to try and find out what makes their publication successful, then adapting those strategies to fit our program. The website re-design I did this year, for example, took inspiration from the modern and colorful designs I saw being featured by School Newspapers Online on their award-winning websites page.
influences
This might be a weird thing to do, but I figured this was a good place to take the opportunity to talk about some of the pieces of media, whether journalism or not, that have shaped me as a writer.
I've mentioned in other parts of this website that, throughout my childhood, I was an avid collector of scientific magazines. I grew up reading National Geographic: Kids, then evolved into a reader of Popular Science and Scientific American. Almost as much as their writing, the visual style of these publications helped build my personal and professional aesthetic. Those magazines represent, in some ways, the first time I fell in love with journalism, and sent me down a path that has let me learn from countless writers.
Though I'm currently focused on print and web news, documentary journalism has always fascinated me. I'm a fan of the work of Lisa Ling and some of CNN's other productions, such as W. Kamau Bell's work with the United Shades of America. Their style of reporting, a blend of investigative, feature and personal narrative, has had a tremendous impact on the way I view journalism as a craft. I'm also particularly interested in documentaries about nature and the environment, having been inspired and educated by too many works to name.
My writing style and journalistic voice are products of a lifetime love of reading. It's a strange mix caused by an early love of poetry and song lyrics, a questionable habit of enjoying pieces by long-winded classic authors, all intensified by a fascination with the moodiness captured by contemporary authors like Joan Didion and the bluntness with which those like Mark Z. Danielewski convey the impossible. Though I don't think anyone of conscious of how their writing is influenced as their style is developing, I think I'm at a point where I can look back and say that this mess of inspirations was somehow wrangled into the journalistic writing style I call my own. Though it's been a wonderfully strange journey to this point, I'm happy to say that it's a style I enjoy writing in, and one that I think resonates with people.