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This article required me to talk to a lot of people that didn’t really want to talk to me. Given the topic of my article, and that I worked for the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, it was pretty obvious to sources that I would be scrutinizing their words. I put a lot of time into tracking down sources, and continuing to call people who said they didn’t want to talk to me.
But one of the hardest parts was talking to people who were very nice and eager to help, and then asking them the tough questions I needed to get a fair and balanced article.
I succeeded in my endeavors, and came out with both sides of the story. Read it here
This was one of the last pieces I wrote as a college student, before taking on my full time LTE position at UComm. I talked to a few ambitious undergraduate students who lead discussion sections for an introductory child psychology class about their interest in the subject, leading their peers, and the skills and experience they’ve gained that will enhance their own futures and careers. It appeared on the UW Web site here and in Wisconsin Week, as can be seen below.
My first big project as Communications Specialist at UComm was spending a couple days at SOAR (Student Orientation, Advising and Registration) to get to know the new students and their parents, the new student leaders and SOAR speakers. Returning to student orientation five years after my own student orientation was a nostalgic, gratifying and somewhat sad experience. I’m jealous of all the new students, who get to start over, and of the new student leaders, who have taken more advantage of UW’s assets than I ever thought to do. But old students and new students alike were fantastic to hang around with. Plus I got three stories out of the deal:
A day in the life of SOAR (this was the lead story on the Wisconsin Web site for several days)
SOAR star retires after 51 years at UW-Madison
Number three is on its way!
I interviewed five talented students for this piece on Gates Millenium Scholars, which is a nation-wide, full-ride minority scholarship. This piece, published both online and in Wisconsin Week, is unique because it contains audio interviews of two of the scholars, which I conducted separately, in an environment conducive to audio quality. Read it here
I wrote this piece for the blog Madprogress.com about the problems with partisanship as an American Jew. While I conducted several interviews to add different perspectives, I largely guided the piece around my own experiences and my personal connection to Israel. View it here.
The first week of the spring semester of 2009, we had an influx of stories at University Communications and I stepped up to the challenge, completing three feature-length pieces on top of maneuvering my way through the first week of classes. I ended up with both front page stories in the Jan. 28 issue of Wisconsin Week.
I collaborated on the Piano Pioneers piece with Big Ten Network project manager, Peter Kleppin, who filmed my interviews and produced an online video collaboration with the written piece. Although I didn’t do any of the taping, The experience gave me great insight as to how to combine media and conduct a visually stimulating as well as mentally stimulating interview simultaneously. Watch it here. The Delta story also appeared online here.
This piece, which appeared both in “Wisconsin Week” and on the University’s Web site, particularly sticks out to me because of all the positive feedback I received from the campus Latino population. One woman, whose Latino husband had been a janitor employed by the university for years, e-mailed me to tell me how grateful she was that Latino students and professors in higher education were recognized in the article, and hopes that positive coverage such as this will lead to a changing perception of the Latino population nation-wide. E-mails such as these remind me of why I wanted to become a journalist in the first place. View the piece here.
Here is one of the dozens of humor columns I wrote every week for the duration of both my junior and senior years.
Election night
I worked on the video coverage of the 2008 election night when Obama claimed victory with journalism school peers Heather Gjerde and Aaron Brenner. For more than six hours, the three of us lagged our equipment from party to party hoping to capture the most enthusiastic crowd in the best lighting. We took turns filming, lighting and gathering the crowd for individual interviews on this historic evening. It was one of the most exhausting and exhilarating nights of my life.
Bridging the Muslim-Jewish Divide
I covered the exhibit “Families of Abraham” when it appeared in Madison in November of 2008 for the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. In addition to adding a local lede to the JTA piece, I conducted a video interview with a university student and a rabbi which appeared on the Chronicle’s Web site alongside the story. See it here.
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