NICK SCHNELLE/MissourianMU senior Emylee Larson walks past the Francis Quadrangle columns on her way to class Thursday. Columbia received 8.7 inches of snow according to the National Weather Service.
So that past couple days the most I’ve been doing at the Missourian is enterprising snow photos. Here’s some from today including some ones that didn’t get published or were outtakes.
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A man with his hands chained stands idle stands on the steps of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis on Saturday, Jan. 15. A slave auction reenactment took place to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War
This morning at the steps of the Old Courthouse in St. Louis was unlike anything I’ve seen.
I slave auction took place—reenactment that is. This Riverfront Times post explains the event pretty well, but essentially the reenactment was held to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The reenactment portrayed a slave auction held in St. Louis in 1861. The event was pretty emotionally intense. You could feel through the onlookers that this reenactment was deeply personal to them—as it should be.
Didn’t stay for too long but I think I got some good stuff:
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A month ago today all that was on my mind was how I would stand up to the task of switching my role as a photographer to a daily news reporter. I remember thinking how much doubt I had due to my experience with the prerequisite, J2100 News. I’ve always been self-conscious about what I write and my ability to put my thoughts onto paper—or keyboard
Now that my four weeks are up with reporting for the Columbia Missourian I feel like I have at the very least met what initial expectations I had for myself. While it is still difficult for me to get my thoughts down into cohesive sentences, I feel much better about writing and to write news stories. There were skills I most definitely gained through my reporting, however, I think I learned the most through the copy editing sessions we had after writing an article. When it came to copy edit my first story, a city council article that was on deadline, I was genuinely surprised the lack of criticism of my writing. “Maybe I can do this,” I thought to myself. From there on, each time it came to copy edit a story I wrote I learned something and tried to apply that knowledge into other stories.
As Aimee Gutshall brought up in our last budget meeting on Friday, the most important thing I took away was to not take what I thought a subject meant for granted. I might have thought I source meant one thing, but it’s important to confirm everything with them. This was most important because by doing so your good quotes would be usable and the structure of a story wouldn’t come into question and have to be totally re-worked on later. This finally sunk into me when I was writing an obituary. It was my first obit where I actually got a hold of a family member. They had great anecdotes and what I had written up was pretty solid—so I thought. When it came to copy edit there were little things in the story that didn’t connect and I had to call back multiple times to confirm information. I felt really bad about having to call back so many times, especially for an obit. The experience of writing this really put things into perspective for me. It learned that I need to listen more carefully when I interview someone. I’m not there just to write what they say, but to listen and ask and ask until I know information is the way it is supposed to be.
I think that for the four weeks I was reporting in the newsroom it would be very unlikely that I would be able to correct all my mistakes. Compared to where I started I believe there was improvement, though.
Seeing all the work that goes into putting together a story and the newspaper in out itself I’ve come to appreciate the effort the editors put into being “real” with us as students. Not one moment did I feel like I wasn’t treated with encouragement and trust from my editors. For all I knew prior to the class I thought I would be drilled into the ground with orders and rhetoric of “needing to do better.” I wasn’t though.
While I don’t know if I met all the expectations this course would hope for out its students, I think I did a pretty good job.
Here is the list of all the articles, photos and obits I did over the past four weeks:
Articles
Obits/Life Stories
Photos
What is next for me you ask? Well, starting Monday I will continue my Missourian crusade, but this time with photos!
So after three + years shooting with a Canon 30D I finally had to switch to a new body. Behold the Canon 7D. Just picked it up this weekend. Mostly been shooting stuff around the parents house over the weekend, but today I went out after I got out of the Missourian and explored around in the snow a bit. Here’s just a few:
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My second to last week of reporting for the Columbia Missourian is almost up. Pretty weird to say that. But it’s easy to see why the time has gone by so fast. Now that I’ve been drenched in this experience of being a reporter it’s finally starting to sink in. I still think I have a lot to learn—I know there is something always to learn. The second week left me thinking about how to come up with story ideas every day. It’s true, there are stories everywhere and at the same time I’m left wondering where they’re at. It’s all about digging in the world around yourself. And with that I’m constantly trying to get better at.
A lot of the second week was spent waiting for sources to call me back on a couple stories that I’ve finally gotten a hold of this week. As a result the lesson to learn from that is learning to be working on multiple stories, some on the “front burner” and some on the “back.”
Another part of my experience is to take on more complex stories. While I still have yet to write a more feature story, my city council “expertise” led me to a story another student had been working on most of the fall semester: the “polluted” Hinkson Creek. I’d like to thank my editor on this story Scott Swafford for helping me with this. It took a lot of reading previous articles written on this, a lengthy summary and other info on this topic to bring me up to speed. I wrote an advanced story about the resolution the council would vote on and then a story on the actual vote. That night of the meeting was brutal. I had wrote a good portion in advance but deciding what information to use afterward was extremely difficult and frustrating. We talked about it the next day in budget and where I got some tips from Katherine Reed on dealing with this. I thought I should pick the best quotes by people, but what I really should of done is kept tabs on themes that came from the meeting that night. Then I could of laid it out better in the story.
It’s simple things like this that can go a long way. Oh well. On the upside I got to take photos of a mountain lion that was shot (got word of it when on my GA shift on Monday.)
Here are some of the stories I’ve been working on since my last blog post:
