Reporting and Writing
Enjoying writing is incredibly important to being a journalist. I'm constantly trying to find interesting topics to write about, and writing about things that affect and directly involve my school (and greater Oviedo area) make me a better active participant in my community and beyond. Click below to read my favorite features, news, opinion and sports stories I've written!
Within our class, we have standard event coverage stories and enhanced stories. For my first true enhanced story after transferring to Hagerty, I decided to cover our untraditional early childhood education program at Hagerty. Coming from another school, the thought of a fully functioning preschool at a high school was unheard of. This program is one of the most beloved at Hagerty, and the lead teacher of the program was retiring at the end of the year, so I knew that I had to cover it well and capture all of the intricacies of the program. As anyone could imagine, high school students running a preschool is a little bit chaotic. While I was previously unfamiliar with using cameras, I decided to take on the challenge of using one and included a photo gallery of children at the preschool completing daily activities with their teachers and underclassmen in the ECE I class to capture all sides of the learning and chaos.
My online editor Greta and I co-wrote this story to tackle the topic of sleep deprivation within teenagers. I knew from the beginning that the part I really wanted to capture was how students deal with the problem since I knew that the problem itself was a bit more simple. This story was a beast, and a lot of planning went into making sure that it was well-covered. This extended to how I wanted it to be represented on our website and print (see web and design sections to see more!). On web, I used the longform template and created chapters for each portion of the story. I also knew that I wanted to make this more interactive and exciting for our readers, so I set up an "infobox," a SNO story element in which you can put a photo with corresponding information, for each method that students use to help them fall asleep. Since Greta and I knew exactly what angles of the sleep deprivation problem we wanted to tackle, writing the story together was simple, as we were able to use each other as a resource throughout, often writing together. Since this was successful for Greta and I, I recommended this approach to two members of my staff, Elleigh and Isabella, as they both wanted to write stories about influencers and consumerism, but had two separate angles to tackle the monster of a topic.
For my final big feature story of my junior year, I decided to write about the local theater scene in Oviedo that students participate in. Hagerty has a pretty robust theater program, with new mics and LED lights, and during the school year, students who can't get enough of theater perform in high school level productions at a local playhouse. The shows in which actors involve themselves often overlap, forcing students to juggle their activities. A challenge with this story was highlighting all of the unique aspects of the different playhouses and theater programs that students participate in. There are so many shows that are going on at the same time across the several premiere programs that the students participate in across Central Florida, but I think I was successfully able to fuse the actors’ breadth of experience in several different shows across many different playhouses. I really liked this story a lot, and I thought the topic was intriguing, which is always what I'm striving for.
Two years ago when I was new to staff, I decided to start a recurring column called Setting Up Shop, where I interviewed shopowners about their stores and all of the time, effort and passion put into running their business. This really helped me explore new areas around me and find these hidden gems. The Ivanhoe Village installment was my favorite out of the six I did, as all of the stores I went to each had their unique spin and were unlike anything I had gone to previously. I also took photos of every store I went to, to immerse my readers in the different boutiques' environments.
This story was something that I knew I wanted to cover once I heard about the approval of Prager U Kids as an educational resource for Florida public schools. For those unfamiliar with Prager U (I’m jealous of you), it is, contrary to popular belief, not an accredited university, but rather a conservative educational channel to combat “woke ideology” in the classroom. This story was honestly pretty hard to write, as I tried to interview several history different teachers on their perspective of Prager U being approved as an educational vendor, but they were extremely hesitant to even give brief thoughts or comment at all about it. This made me rely on press releases from Florida Department of Education officials and raw quotes from Prager U videos that were just blatantly false. While it was a battle to complete, I am extremely proud of this story and how it accurately portrayed Prager U’s misinformation, and my overall opinion that supplemental materials shown in the classroom should be purely based in fact, not political ideology.
A stark contrast from my Prager U story is my commentary on celebrity relationship drama. This story remains one of my favorites. As someone who knows far too much about pop culture, AG’s affair with her Wicked co-star Ethan Slater was something that I was invested in as an Ariana fan since her Nickelodeon days. Sometimes with opinion stories, it can take a large deal of planning for me, as I want to make sure that my argument is clear; however, with this story, I just started typing and let my substantial knowledge on the topic flow out. My advisor Mr. Taylor and I really wanted to use this column to showcase a more entertaining style of writing for our website, and I think it was a great exercise for me to take my writing a little less seriously and have more fun when reporting.
This was my first big story of my junior year, and writing about standardized testing while in the trenches of taking both the SAT and ACT throughout the year was only fitting. I found the College Board’s divisive change from paper-based to digital incredibly interesting, and our students’ opinions on the update were either strongly positive or strongly negative. The most difficult part about writing this story was sorting through the interviews, as both our testing coordinator, Po Dickison, and the students I interviewed had a lot to say during our 15+ minute conversations. All in all, I think that this interview was a nice fusion of a news and feature story, and while it was a monster of a story, I really enjoyed writing it because it helped me learn more about a change that was directly impacting me and every student taking the College Board test in the future.
I wrote this story in my sophomore year, and it was one of the first news stories that I wrote that I really wanted to cover. After seeing talks of a protest against gun violence after the devastating Nashville school shooting, students of all grades walked out of their seventh periods. Students took turns speaking in the middle of the congregation, speaking about why they were personally frightened to go to school because of the recent school shootings. I attended the walkout so I could cover it, but I felt really connected to the event itself and the heartfelt testimonies students were giving, which made it really easy to tell the story. While I wrote this story two years ago, it is still one of the stories that I am most proud of.
While sports isn’t my favorite beat, this girls basketball story from my sophomore year went smoothly and was special since it was the first time the team had won districts in our school’s history (two years later they have a record of 7-14). The team’s story was especially entertaining that season, as longtime boys basketball coach Josh Kohn also coached girls basketball and the team’s star senior Hannah Kohn, his daughter. Covering sports has encouraged me to go to games and develop more school spirit, and I think it's necessary for me to continue to push myself to cover stories that are out of my preferred beat. Continuing to learn and try new things is my goal!
We are always looking for ways to include all of our sports and extracurriculars in our stories, so when our varsity dance team won their second national title, I knew I had to cover it. Their coach, Diane Brooks, was extremely knowledgeable on the competition circuit, which made it easy to write the story. The dancers’ interviews for this story were also really emotional because they had all looked up to the team that had won two years prior and wanted to replicate their success. It was also nice to learn about how much chemistry they had built throughout the years they had danced together, making this story enjoyable to write and read.