Daily Deacon

First Reflection – Meg

Writing this first article, I made sure I gathered sources from as many different perspectives as I could related to DXP: the President, a current member, and a recruitment attendee. I tried to focus on the multicultural aspect of the sorority that defines it from other groups on campus, and through the interviews, discovered how important that aspect was to each individual as well as their image of Wake. I started the article off with a little anecdote to introduce the sorority’s impact, and then continued with a hard lede about DXP. From there, I alternated between quotes and anecdotes from the interviews and information on the actual sorority, taking a sort of kabob approach to the structure.

In revisions, I took my editor, Annabel Love’s, advice to specify the date DXP’s recruitment took place as well as trying to take away any hint of bias towards the difference between DXP and traditional rush, adding how it works for some one way and DXP offers an alternative.

University Brainstorming Assignment // Katie Dickens

5 key people to talk to if I were writing a story about Wake Forest:

Dean Shore- Photographer, Barber

McKenzie Ziegler- Assistant and Speechwriter for Adam Hammer

Jeff Holleman- Patrol Officer for the WFU Police

Mary Gerardy- Associate VP Campus Life and Director of Global Engagement of the Pro Humanitate Institute

Noel Shepherd- Regional Director of Athletic Development

5 key sources of information:

http://sg.wfu.edu/– The student government website stays up to date and sends out frequent updates.

Dean Shore’s Facebook Page- With his permission, his Facebook site would be an excellent source of images for stories.

https://zsr.wfu.edu/special/archives/– The historical records of Wake Forest are accessible online through the ZSR website.

http://campuslife.wfu.edu/– The Campus life website allows access to information about clubs, organizations, and most importantly, upcoming events

3 story ideas:

Standardized Testing in Admissions – why Wake Forest chose not to make them a required factor, look at the percentage of students who don’t submit them, interview admissions officers.

A day in the life of a student-athlete – attend their required tutoring sessions, etc.

Look at political involvement on campus, conduct interviews to get a feel for the political climate of the campus.

Beat Reporting – Anna Conte

5 Key People to Speak With:

Nathan O. Hatch-Wake Forest President

Employee at the Pit

Ron Wellman- Athletic Director

Custodial Staff Member

Campus Religious Figure, such as Catholic Priest: Fr. Marcel Amadi

5 Sources of Information:

-Past issues of Old Black & Gold, located in ZSR.

-Wake Forest Office of Admissions, data collections of students enrolled at Wake.

-WIN directory. Shows major, where the student lives on campus, etc.

-http://www.hercampus.com/school/wake-forest

-Recorded minutes that are documented within

3 story ideas:

1) Upcoming soccer trip to Spain, interview players about when/where they will be traveling, what they are doing & who they will be playing. Focus on Wake Forest Athletics.

2) Profile on a custodial staff member that works in Residential Dorm.

3) A focus on student entrepreneurs. Many Wake students have started up their own personal businesses and it would be interesting to do a feature on these select students. I would find out how they operate and what resources they use at campus that allow them to maintain their specialties.

Reflection – Anna Conte

Writing about ‘Wake the Vote’ was difficult in that I was trying to talk to these students and the faculty members while they were traveling, therefore they were restricted in their availability. It took a lot of coordination to find times to talk! However, I really enjoyed writing this article. I am very intrigued by Politics & this program so it was fun to learn more about what exactly they are doing.

While working with Rachel, she reminded me of AP style elements that I needed to edit on my paper as well as point out some attribution errors that were within my original article.

(sorry, I originally emailed this instead of posting this here!)

Assignment 1 Reflection — Bennett

I really enjoyed writing this article because it gave me insight into sports writing while also helping me learn more about our soccer program. As far as the interviewing and information gathering goes, it was much less stressful than I expected it to be. The internet is such a useful tool for journalism, it gives me perspective and admiration for journalists who worked before its existence. This assignment gave me a good template for how I plan to conduct my interviews and gather information for the remainder of the course. As far as writing is concerned, I think this article gave me some insight as to how to structure a news story. I still need to work on the detached, biasless voice required for this kind of journalism but I get the sense that it will become much easier as time goes on. I’m excited to see how sports writing differs from the other kind of journalistic pieces I’ll be working on over the course of the semester.

Reflection

In doing this story I focused using a combination of my experience at the event and interviews I had with people who attended. After going to the 1834 event I felt like I had a decent amount to write about regarding the atmosphere and the scene. That being said, once I interviewed all the people who I wanted to talk to I felt like I had much more of a story. I conducted five different interviews with people who attended the event and people who organized the event. I conducted 3 of my interviews over FaceTime on my phone. I found this to be a very convenient method for doing the interview. I was able to get all the reactions and responses in real time, which I felt made it more authentic. It was also much easier to do it over FaceTime because I didn’t have to organize a meeting place with anybody, or deal with fitting our schedules together. For the other sources I wrote emails to people who could provide me with information about the event. This was not as convenient and more time consuming for my source, but still proved to be an effective way to gather information. I tried to base this story off of a mix between a slice of life piece and a feature about the 1834 Student Giving Campaign.

Reflection — Chris Caswell

Writing this news story was challenging, but it was also the most rewording one I’ve written. I was somewhat nervous at first whether I could get the sources I needed to write an accurate profile of the since the people that Alexander Literary Organization influence the most are in a maximum security prison. But, it ended up being easier than I thought. I asked the president of the organization for a contact person at the prison and emailed him for a good time to call and mentioned that I would like to get a quote from an inmate if I could. Once he understood what I was working on, the coordinator at the prison was very helpful and even brought an inmate to the phone for me to speak to. Hearing him talk about the program’s influence on him made that interview the most powerful and moving one I’ve done. Once I talked to my two sources in the prison, it felt like the story wrote itself.

Brandon Liu edited on my story, and he was very helpful. He pointed out some sentences that did not flow well and just had awkward wording.

Reflection // Rachel Hirsch

Writing this story was fun, yet challenging. AIA is something a lot of my teammates are involved in, but I never knew just exactly what it was. I asked a teammate, Heather Wiley, as to who I should talk to for this story. She gave me the contact information for all three of my sources. I emailed all three and set up times to interview them. Thankfully, the job of the two interns is basically to have meetings with students so it was super easy to get together with them. The soccer player was relatively easy too, but we just had to work around both of our practice schedules.

Anna Conte edited my paper and really helped to organize my story in a different way. She pointed out how to make my paragraphs shorter by letting the quotes stand out more. Anna also helped with the concept of attribution. I had a couple sentences that needed to be changed!

Reflection Paragraph//Karlee Spirit

I approached writing my first story with a grain of salt. Aiming to not include any bias thoughts or opinion, I wrote strictly on informational ideas and factual news. I picked my three sources based upon different perspectives and different views towards the event of Career Night and the way in which it benefited or impacted each source. For this story, I did not base my writing off of an already written piece but find that doing so might be helpful for my next story. In all, however, I sincerely enjoyed writing this piece. Career Night is one of my favorite events every year and I personally think it benefits every student-athletes with their future after Wake. It was interesting to interview athletes who attended and even outside forces who work with athletes and find many trends among them, specifically female student-athletes.

Katie Dickens edited my paper and helped me in soooooooo many ways. She contributed to helping me fix my structural problems as well as steering me in the right direction of the correct APA citations and using my quotes and sources properly. She also helped my fix small things within my paper like rewording and grammatical mistakes.

Assignment 1 Reflection – Suyash Keshari

I chose to write about this story because the exhibit is very unique, deals with current ecological issues and their impact on the future. Initially I was not sure what I was exactly going to report on – the journey of a Wake Forest class to the SECCA exhibit, feature story on the exhibit or a visitor’s experience at the exhibit. Thankfully I was able to interview enough people to explore and expand on any of the story ideas. I interviewed the curator of SECCA Ms.Cora Fisher who was very easy to talk to and enthused about the fact that I was from Wake. I interviewed some of the visitors in the exhibit including students from my film class that I went with and the professor. I realized that it was hard to get something substantial from my peers as most of them would say “I thought it was pretty cool” or “It’s intriguing.” I had to delve deeper into their thoughts by using multiple questions.

I tried searching for a New York times or Washington Post article on an exhibition or gallery opening but was not successful at finding a good one so I decided to base my story independently hoping that it would work.

Although I would like to consider myself as a photojournalist, this was the first time I covered a news story. Writing this story made me realize that what I do (wildlife photography but not the campaign I am working on) is more on the lines of telling stories through my photographs, blogging and not exactly hard line journalism. This assignment led me to realize the separation between the two.