news – CA Work Experience Program

Day 8

Guys!! My story is up on INDY Week’s website! Find it here: https://indyweek.com/news/durham/durham-hit-10000-participatory-budgeting-goal/.

If you are for some reason interested in economics, I highly suggest you read it as well as the original story, found here.

In short, my last day at INDY Week was bittersweet. I finalized my story (I went with the first version after Jeff told me to “trust my instincts”), and it went through copyedits and the like before publication. I also ran some basic copyedits on Thomasi and I’s story, adding Oxford commas to every serial phrase (we’ve had some disagreements). It was a great day, but I’m sad to be leaving.

Since it’s my last day at the office, I’m putting some journalistic things/phrases I’ve learned below:

Some terms:
1. Lede: The first sentence/paragraph of a story. Should give a basic summary of the story.
2. Hed: The story’s headline.
3. Dek: The sentence that goes after the headline, kind of like a subheading but longer and more comprehensive.
4. Graf: A paragraph in a journalistic article. In journalistic writing, these are usually short; Thomasi is a big fan of grafs that are only one sentence long.
5. Folo: A follow-up question, often in reference to an additional email sent to a person who you already emailed on that topic.
Getting quotes is hard, especially when you’re using a high school email. I found that, on average, more people responded to emails from my Gmail account than from my CA one.
People want to read personal stories. Starting an article with an anecdote is a tried-and-true way to draw people into the text.
Getting advice from peers is beyond helpful, but when in doubt, go with your gut.
No matter how bad you think you are with technology, in a news office, being under a certain age means you’ll always get questions about it. Case in point: even the college interns were asking me if I could find people’s emails for them.

I’m so grateful to the awesome people at INDY for this experience. I learned so much and had an amazing time!

Day 7

Today was again a busy one! I sent out at least half a dozen emails to everyone from the chair of the Durham County Board of Commissioners to the Durham mayor. I got quotes back from multiple sources on multiple topics (I sent out a few emails for each of the stories I’m working on, the story on participatory budgeting and the story on crime). It’s weird because it feels a lot like what I do for yearbook: Skyping middle schoolers about their experiences playing on Blue Basketball is a lot more similar to Facebook Messenger-ing Durham residents for their takes on the city’s budget than you would think.

Perhaps the most funny thing to me– who, at the beginning of my junior year, was nervous to Skype said middle schoolers– is that I’m getting much less intimidated reaching out to people I don’t know. When Thomasi asked me to email the mayor today, I copy-pasted my question pack from OneNote without batting an eye. (Okay, maybe I batted an eye, but only a little bit.)

On the topic of said quotes, I also got a few really great ones back for my story on participatory budgeting. My mess of a Word document is shaping up into a story that’s weirdly close to my heart. I’ve found myself starting to care quite a lot about an initiative that I hadn’t known about before this week, and the stories I’ve heard from the people I’ve reached out to have been incredible to hear and write about.

And write I have– in fact, I’ve been working on the story for the last hour or so. I literally have three versions of it pasted and labeled on different pages of a Word document. I’m planning to ask Thomasi and a few of the other staff writers which version they like better tomorrow. I’m crossing my fingers that this story will actually make its way to the online pages of Indy Week– a lot of stories get scratched– but either way, I’m so proud of the work I’ve done.

OH– and I didn’t even mention the best, most important, most wonderful part of my day. It might just have been the highlight of my week.

My boss Jeff brought his dogs to work.

Their names are Sebastian and Belle, and they’re some of the sweetest puppies I’ve ever met.

Did I hold Sebastian on my lap during an entire staff meeting? Yes. After said staff meeting, did Jeff ask me to watch both dogs while he went to a meeting? Yep.

Did I agree and spend at least twenty minutes cuddling with them? Absolutely.

Day 6

Production Day, Part 2: When I came to the office this morning, it was packed. Our part-time copyeditor, Cole, was tackling a stack of papers at his desk; the arts editor, Brian, was working on formatting for one of his articles; college intern Thomas was writing another new story; EIC Jeff was typing furiously at the computer in his office. Thomasi got here a few minutes after me, and we worked to compile charts, write the opening for our crime feature, and string quotes together into something comprehensive. I also reached out to the Durham Police again; I’m getting, I think, pretty good at writing professional-sounding emails.

We also referenced one of Thomasi’s old articles describing how Durham officials called publicly for “common-sense gun laws” back in January. It’s interesting seeing how national hot-button issues, and their controversies, translate to local politics and news.

In addition to that story, I continued working on my participatory budgeting article, communicating with the project’s budget coordinators and reaching out to a city council member who spearheaded the initiative.

Once we hit 2:00 deadline, the newsroom started to quiet down. I spent most of the late afternoon looking through a report from the DPD, meeting with Ms. Eason when she stopped by, and chatting with the two college interns, Thomas and Sophia, as they leafed through old classified ads.

The newest edition of INDY Week is out tomorrow, so go pick up a copy if you’re out in Durham (or check out the website at indyweek.com)!

For reference, here’s a few pictures of last week’s edition. It’s amazing to see how much a small team of people can put together in just a week.