Reporting Experience
In October of 2023, I got my first taste of investigative journalism. There was an upcoming school board election in my district that had become very polarizing within the community, but I saw that the local news was doing little to circulate information about candidates. With the support of my journalism adviser, I set out to explore the controversies and issues at stake in the election.
My journey began with interviews- and lots of them. I met with seven of the eight candidates, all either in person or over Zoom. In the interest of equality, I tried to keep my questions relatively the same, with only a few deviations for specific scenarios or follow-ups. For example, I added a question for one candidate who had been escorted out of a prior board meeting. All of my interview questions were kept in a singular document so I could cross-reference as needed.
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It was also important to me that I did not misquote or misattribute any quotes in my article, so I used the recorder and transcriber app Otter to create audio recordings for each interview.
I kept my recordings organized by listing each of my interviewees names along with the date they were interviewed. Because Otter transcribes interviews, I was then able to pull quotes more directly and quickly. Keeping my own biases out of the article was difficult, but I knew how important it was that my community have an honest source that could inform their decisions when voting. Before publication, I asked my adviser and many of my peers to complete edits. |
After the article was published, I received almost immediate feedback. It took only a few days for the piece to become our fifth most viewed story in history, garnering over 3,000 reads. I also received feedback from several community members, including a local journalism professor. Not everyone viewed my work positively, but simply knowing that people were reading my work was all I needed to keep writing and spreading the truth.
Shortly after that first piece, I embarked on my next venture: coverage of a public forum between the candidates. I was one of the only students in attendance, so I knew my writing could be wildly important to the way my peers voted. While the recording of the forum was available to the public, there was little synthesis of candidate perspectives, so I made sure to juxtapose the contrasting viewpoints.
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By the time of the election, I had cemented myself locally as the student journalist providing coverage, so I felt I had a responsibility to report on the results quickly. I also had accumulated enough quotes from prior interviews that I didn't need to speak to the same people again, speeding up the writing. process.
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After the election, I believed my responsibilities as a journalist had been fulfilled. And for a few weeks, they were. But news of a recount sent social media abuzz once again. Some of my earlier contacts once again reached out with information, making it clear that the community needed to hear the full truth from a reliable source. I decided to write this piece at 8 p.m. on a Saturday, and the recount confirmation meeting would take place the next Monday at 4 p.m. Because of the short timeframe, I gave myself a deadline of 3 p.m. the next day. The connections I had formed earlier in the election process proved to be incredibly useful, providing me with documents supporting every fact of the story. Despite my evidence, I faced more backlash than ever before. I was accused of not having written my own work, because people didn't believe a student could have the sophistication of thought and writing style that I had demonstrated.
The process of investigating this school board election has been nothing short of life changing for me. Being recognized in my community as a real journalist is an incredible honor as a student, and the lessons I have learned are priceless.
More than anything, this process has made me more steadfast in my love for journalism, reenforcing that a career in the field is exactly what I want to do. |
Award Winning Work
You can see the rest of my work on my staff profile