Reporting & Writing
Opinion, Sports, News, Feature & Entertainment Writing
OPINION
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This article was the first of mine to run in the print newspaper. Due to my connection with the art community online, I had a good amount of knowledge on how artificial art was affecting artists. I also realized that no one else knew the effects of using AI art in my newsroom and in my school, so I wrote my first opinion piece on why AI art is unethical. This piece is still important to me as it conveys my frustration and perception of AI art in a way that is understandable to those outside of the community. Going back to this article, I would write more about the place it may have in journalism. This is how I learned to write opinion pieces and understand the writing process the writers in News Lab go through in a cycle. I also worked closely with the Opinion Editor at the time in order to understand my mistakes.
I was the primary writer of this editorial, and it strayed away from a typical editorial in that it was written to inform. Electronic passes was a system that was planned to be developed by the time the issue came out, and we could not critique it yet as we had not seen its effects. Instead, we decided to inform students about how the system works in order to clear some of the confusion and misconceptions around the new pass system. This editorial proved difficult due to the administration not having all the information yet to provide us with concrete answers. I also designed this article, meaning I got to create an infographic that explained what I could not in the article. The infographic helped give a visual understanding of the system.
SPORTS
This was the first time I had covered basketball, and it was both a girls and boys basketball game versus one of our rivals, Liberty High. I worked with new camera equipment in order to get high quality shots. I also did research on how point scoring and the team lineups were in order to get a summary play by play of the game. This was also achieved while I was in Pep Band, meaning I was going from instrument to camera. I posted this a few days after, including social media posts with high definition pictures. I learned a lot about covering sports and what I want to work to improve on similar stories in the future.
I worked together to produce this story, as I was also running in this state qualifying meet. I coordinated between the photographer and the boy’s cross country writer in order to create a double story. I also included the changes within the qualifying system that occurred this year. I made sure to include research into team and individual rankings to provide context to the story.
Girls track and field was someone's beat last year, however it was not getting any coverage. In doing so, I stepped up to write the meet qualifying story even though I had competed in the meet. I included results, photos from other sources and the necessary information for the state track meet coming later that week.
While competing in the Drake Relays myself, I worked as the only representative to gather pictures for a co-writer and me to write a brief on the girls and boys track team at state. In between my own events and duties, I aimed to capture as many pictures as I could with the limited access I had. I included photos, results and social media engagements to the brief.
NEWS
When asked by our advisor to cover the resource fair happening that class period, two journalists and I volunteered to go cover the fair. While Sachiko Goto took pictures, Jane Lam and I went around gathering interviews from both advisors, students and members alike. We wrote the story on zoom together that night in order to have it up as soon as possible.
During our exporting night for print, the fire alarms went off and all after school programs waited outside. While doing so, our advisor Ms. Whittaker asked if someone wanted to cover this and I volunteered. Snapping pictures with my regular phone, I asked for information after being let inside. I also recorded the time in order to accurately provide the timeline of events.
FEATURE
I worked with the PALs teacher in order to join in on one of their days to an elementary school to get a first hand experience with their program. I got to interact with students I had never met before and talk with the teacher about how the program works. I spent the time taking pictures, which I had gotten permission from the school to take pictures of the kids, and later wrote about my direct experience with the group. I wanted to give students who were interested in taking the class but did not have any information on how it functioned an article on what they should know before signing up. This also informed other students of opportunities West has.
This was my first story on web as a West Side Story journalist, and I decided to do a preliminary article to "A day in the life of a PAL" where I interviewed the teacher on the class and the new responsibilities that he had. I decided to do a Q&A format as well as drawing my own feature image to demonstrate what PALs is. This was some of our first coverage on PALs, so after this article I wanted to reach deeper into their program and the students that take the class.
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
This entertainment piece was run in the print newspaper, where I collected song recommendations from our staff and sorted them into four playlists that could be accessed through spotify. I used an embedded feature to post this story, making the playlists and cover art myself.
I wanted to do something different for this article as past missed connections articles had just text or the same submissions. To challenge myself, I figured out how to create a GIF feature image themed on my design, and then I drew themed images that included 40+ responses we received. I also made sure to promote this through our instagram. This was a fun creative challenge for me and I used different programs to help me develop this work.