A Journalist, Activist and Researcher.
News Gathering
News gathering is an integral aspect of journalism. It is where reporters are given roles that they will play in various fields, photojournalists are assigned duties, and each person is informed and brief of what they will cover over the course of four weeks - the typical timing for a single production cycle. Being the current Managing Editor and the past Features editor, a free press organization, I play a major role in initiating this process.
Pitching Ideas
Each week at El Estoque starts off with Monday Meetings, where section editors lead a pitching session and elicit story pitches, or ideas, from staff writers. Together, the section works on refining and developing those pitches, ensuring that they are timely, reportable, and relevant to the Monta Vista HS community.
As a writer, I am a heavy contributor to these meetings. Many of my pitches stem from news events I read online, and as such, I get daily emails from theSkimm, CNN, and the New Yorker and am an avid user of the news application News Break, which provides insight into news local to the San Jose/South Bay Area community. To get inspiration for social-justice based and cultural stories, I am also subscribed to Global Citizen for up-to-date news on the most pertinent issues facing society today and the Medium Daily Digest for societal critiques and columns.
List of pitches: In addition, I also maintain a list of pitches on the Notes application of my phone. As a Features editor last year, I had an entire document dedicated to large-scale Multimedia Package ideas, as I knew going into the year that generating pitches for larger projects had been an issue in the past. The current Features editors continue to use this document.
Teaching lessons: As Managing Editor, I noticed that many stories being published had weak angles or didn't connect directly to the MVHS community. In addition, some pitches generated were all too similar to stories published in the past. Since one of El Estoque's goal is to stay up to date and provide fresh content, I took it upon myself to create several lessons explaining the importance of pitching, finding a new angle and interviewing effectively. Following these two presentations attached below, the Editorial Team began doing a pitches brainstorm session, where each section editor stands up and tells the class what stories their section plans to cover and, in return, the rest of the staff provides feedback on the pitch as well as possible sources.
Interviewing
As a journalist, I believe my greatest strength lies in my interviewing abilities. Over the course of four years, I've had the opportunity to interview people from all walks of life and the honor to pen their experiences down in my stories. This is a privilege I do not take lightly and am continuously repurposing myself to both improve my own interviewing abilities and teaching my love of interviewing with others as a Managing Editor.
In Practice
Nothing higher than truth: As I set out to begin reporting for "Nothing higher than truth," which explores the misportrayal of Hinduism in a school setting, I knew I wanted to go beyond just getting the facts. Rather, I sought to write the story in a news-feature manner, where I get riveting interviews from excellent sources and connect the hard facts with the soft human experiences. Thankfully for me, my plan worked, in large part because of the way I phrased my interview questions, which integrated my prior research on the source's background and their expected beliefs.
Beyond the binary: Before conducting any interview for my story on intersex people, "Beyond the binary," my co-reporters and I made sure to do our research first and understand which questions were appropriate to ask and which were not. As such, we referred to the following guide published by InterACT on how best to cover the intersex community to ensure that during the interview process, we treated our intersex sources with respect and dignity. Only after doing our initial research did we begin brainstorming interview questions. Our first source was Emily Brehob, and after doing a quick online search on her, we learned that she was not only an intersex activist but a passionate global development scholar as well. This information helped me structure my interview questions better, as seen below, and allowed Brehob to open gradually and reveal vivid experiences from your life, also seen below to the right.
What's the news?: At the start of the 2019-20 year, I wrote my first article "What's the news?" on the five major news events that occurred over summer. To ensure that I was providing accurate information to my readers, I researched even the most minuscule of details and then integrated student sources to give a well-rounded assessment of each chosen news event. Here's an example; the highlights signify that research was conducted to write that paragraph.
