The most memorable of my notes from that meeting.
newsgathering
The summer before my junior year, as I was working with my adviser to plan our yearbook, she tasked me with attending a school board meeting for my first ever piece on Tiger Times Online. I had never been to a meeting like this, especially not as a reporter. I took frantic notes of everything the board members said, all of the public comments and how people seemed to react to the board's plans.
The environment was particularly stressful for me as a new reporter because the board was meeting to discuss how they'd implement COVID testing and exclusion protocols, and many members of the community had come to argue with their decisions. It was a struggle for me to decide how I should report on the comments of community members. With the guidance of my adviser we decided not to include the names of said people in my article despite our program's strict rule against anonymous sources, as a recording of the meeting was publicly available but we did not want to risk singling out an individual person.
While there were some aspects of my reporting that I would have handled differently now that I have more experience, writing about the board meeting taught me a lot about the basics of notetaking and researching when it comes to controversial topics.
my enterprise project
I've learned a lot about reporting since that first board meeting. As my first semester in Advanced Journalistic Composition came to a close, I had the opportunity to put those skills into practice on a much larger scale than I was used to when our class was assigned to research and write for an enterprise project. I decided to write my project about crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe filling the gaps when people can't afford medical treatment. In doing so, I reached out to many families during incredibly stressful periods of their lives, and had to navigate the sensitive subject of health while trying to learn about their situations.
SOURCE NOTES
To understand what had already been said about the subject, I gathered all of my sources into one document and began to take notes on them. The result is this 12-page annotated document, where I list sources for all of my graphics, quotes and comments about GoFundMe's platform. The only one not listed here is my main source for the article, a full transcript of an interview I conducted with someone who was raising money to help her father heal from heart surgery.
If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.
The practice of listing all of my sources and taking notes on them, as well as listing questions and topics I plan to cover with each, is something I try to do for all of my pieces that require a fair amount of research --- though I'll admit that my enterprise project notes take the prize for longest document.
Here's an example of what that looks like for a shorter news piece, from one I'm currently working on for our online newspaper.
INTERVIEWING
After attempting to speak with several campaign organizers directly through GoFundMe's built-in "contact" service, I went to Twitter to search for people who were promoting their campaigns. This was how I first contacted Kenadi Silcox, a financial journalist who was raising money for her father who had just had heart surgery. I exchanged a few messages with her over Twitter, then scheduled a Zoom meeting where we had an in-depth discussion about her situation. She was able to offer a unique perspective both as someone who had experienced the crowdfunding phenomenon firsthand and as someone who wrote about the economy as a career.
Prior to the interview, I took note of recurring themes I saw in the articles I had read about the topic and wrote questions based on them, which you can see in this document. I also included several questions about things that I hadn't seen covered in the articles I'd read, like what the crowdfunding process actually felt like for the people going through it.
I recently contacted Silcox via Twitter again, where she gave me permission to publish my enterprise project on my portfolio.
If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.
This experience taught me a lot about interviewing, and made me a much more confident reporter (I remember being very worried about embarrassing myself in front of a professional journalist in the days leading up to this interview). Since this project, I've found that I'm much more willing to jump into the action, voice recorder at the ready. It also showed me how to formulate questions and prepare for an interview, allowing me to ask thoughtful questions and conduct more natural interviews.
THE FINAL PIECE
While this piece was integral in my learning to be a better reporter and journalist, I've still learned a lot since writing it halfway through my junior year. Either way, I'm incredibly proud of how I was able to push myself as a journalist in the creation of this piece.
Enterprise projects aren't published in our class, so I've attached the document I turned in.
If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.
surveys
One way that our publication is able to reach a diverse array of students is by posting surveys for the entire school to see. EHS administration uses the platform Schoology to update students at the school, and they often help us by posting surveys that we create on the page so that every student will have a chance to respond to it.
I've attached a survey I created for an article I'm currently writing about COVID emergency declarations being allowed to expire this year.
If the Google Drive embed doesn't work, try to see the document here.