REPORTING AND WRITING
Shooting Threat News Brief
Writing the news brief on the shooter threat started from the minute that the announcement of the shelter-in-place was made. When approaching this story, I wanted to make sure that I was covering all aspects of what had happened succinctly, especially because most of MVHS was unaware of what had happened. So, I kept a timeline of when different announcements were happening, promptly contacted Claunitzer for an interview and got the story up within 24 hours of the event happening. Here, I practiced my initiative, being very active both on Slack and within the story with Jonah, to get the information up as soon as possible.
The bigger picture
As a part of the larger features package about advocacy, this story covers the ways that photographers in our community have contributed to larger social movements. As someone with my own passions for photography, reporting on the power of photos beyond their journalistic use continued to inform my own photography practices to this day.
The Project 2025 predicament
Facing the uncertainty of the upcoming 2024 election, I took multiple national issues addressed in Project 2025 and applied a more local lens. Broken into three parts, I worked with my co-writers to tackle three specific topics that would specifically impact the lives of MVHS students through various multimedia tools and community perspectives. As a part of the larger J-Camp, an introductory boot camp for incoming journalism students, I mentored these new staff through the reporting and editing process with this story, emphasizing unbiased and objective coverage regarding this highly political issue.
Embracing brainrot
The brainrot story was initially pitched jokingly; our section found brainrot to be purely for irony and not to ever be taken seriously. Yet, I reflected on my conversation with my elementary-school-aged sisters, where their peers often used the language in conversation as slang amongst each other. This gave me the idea to pursue this angle, where our limited, joking view of brainrot is not the only opinion that exists. Rather, through my writing, I had to put aside my own assumptions and biases against brainrot to find some of its merits in a changing world.