Writing
Writing stories was, and still is, my favorite part of the journalism process. Every story I type is like a child, and I want to raise it to be the best it can be. I pride myself on my ability to vary myself in the stories I write. Whether it's a news brief, feature, editorial or review, I'll write it. It's for this reason that this page is divided into four subcategories.
News Story
News stories take the quickest turnaround, but they include the most information. The trick with them is to find the best way to connect all the pieces of information in a cohesive manner that accomplishes two things: to transfer the information to the reader and urge the reader to read onward. One can easily read the headline, or perhaps even the lead before moving on. So, it's up to the writer to keep the reader engaged.
Sit With Us Lunch
The Student Ambassadors Club organized this semi-regular event to get new students at Hagerty the chance to make friends. I originally intended to get perspectives from both the Ambassadors and the students that the Lunch was thrown for. However, club sponsors denied me interviews with the partakers of the lunch, due to not wanting to reveal their identities. So, I changed the angle of the story to focus on how the event came to be. In the end, the story that had the most difficulty getting interviews for ended up being an All-Florida.
Football vs. Oviedo
The main purpose of these stories is to inform readers of upcoming events, usually ones that are staples of the school year. We do these stories for Drama Department shows and, this year, for the varsity football game against our rival. It was the first of many stories in our staff's Rivalry Week coverage, which are all linked in this story. The package won Best of the Best in the 2018 FSPA Fall contests.
Let's Get Ready to Rumble
In my fifth story for The BluePrint, I covered the Presidential Debate at Hofstra University for the 2016 FSPA Deadline Web Coverage fall contest. This story highlights the research necessary for doing a story. After researching information about the debate, I used it to gauge how the school's politically active students were responding to the election at large. This package won first place.
Feature Story
As I began to get more experience on staff, I began to gravitate towards feature stories. Their purpose, in my eyes, is to either shed light on those that may have not been noticed had I not highlighted them or dig deeper into what's already been revealed. One key technique I learned to use when writing these stories was to treat myself like I was a reader of the story. Those that read features are, by extension, curious about the information or the people that I write about. If I wrote the story to where, if I saw it, I'd want to read it, then I know I did my job.
A Football Life
I was involved in the Pop Warner program for many years due to my brother playing. I never played myself, but I was intrigued about how the program impacted our varsity team. Turns out, many players that started playing football at the youngest level of Pop Warner continued on to the varsity team. In this story, I examined those players and how Pop Warner is able to instill the love of football into so many players. This story was The Best of The Best Sports Profile of 2018.
Cheer Back on Top
Everyone already knew that the varsity cheerleaders won the state championship. By that point, it's become as routine as getting out of bed in the morning. But that season was different, and that was this story's mission was to showcase why. This story showed a team come back from a broken state winning streak and multiple injuries and illnesses to rally behind their coach, who was doing it all one last time. This story was an All-Florida in 2018.
Crash Course
This feature required more research than any story I've ever encountered. From seeking local car crash data from local law enforcement to interviewing car crash victims and hearing their stories, this story is steeped in both research and subject anecdotes.
Editorial
Writing argumentative essays in language arts and writing editorials for the newspaper are quite similar in purpose, but the execution is slightly different. Editorials usually need to latch on relevant issue of the time: therefore there is a sense of timeliness involved. Editorials provide a platform for writers to articulate their feelings on an issue or topic, something that I was enthusiastically wanting to try during my earlier days om staff. Even as I've matured as a writer, whenever I feel the urge to speak my mind, I write one of these.
Canidate Donald Trump
I threw myself in the journalistic deep end early in my days on The BluePrint staff. My first story to be featured in a print issue was an editorial defending who would soon be the 45th President. The 2016 election was a very polarizing topic, and I think that's what lured me to write this editorial. I preferred Trump over Clinton in that election, and I knew it was a pretty unpopular stance, so, preparing for the worst, I illustrated my arguments the best I could, like I was writing an argumentative essay in AP Lang. In the end, I received nothing out positive feedback. It was a confidence booster for me as a journalist.
Just Don't
I've always been a sports fan. So, I've been witnessed Colin Kaepernick in the news cycle a lot of times before Nike featured him in their new ad campaign last fall. When the 2018 Fall digital contests gave me an opportunity to write my feelings on the matter, I was all too eager to take it. However, I was already past the point of commentating on his kneeling to the anthem. I'd written about it already. So for this editorial, I needed a new angle. I ended up focusing not on Kaepernick, but on Nike. This editorial gave me an appreciation for stepping back and seeing the bigger picture.
Comic Critic
During my sophomore and junior years on staff, I had a column where I talked about superhero movies and tv shows. They were a passion of mine ever since middle school and to be able to talk about them was an amazing experience. This particular column, a personal favorite, focuses on racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in superhero media. It focuses on how everybody needs a hero they can project themselves onto, and for some, it's becoming a reality.
Review
I began to grow a critical eye for movies and tv around the time I entered high school, so when I joined the BluePrint, I wanted to be able to explore that aspect of myself. Reviewing these shows and movies have allowed me to grow and appreciate their mediums, something very personally enriching for me.
Trollhunters
For my first review on the BluePrint staff, I wanted to highlight something that not many people would have seen. So, during Christmas break, I reviewed the first season of Trollhunters. Reviewing it allowed me to get a feel for what my style of review writing was and figure out how to balance information about the show with my own thoughts on it. To my surprise, it was this story that earned me my first All-Florida at the FSPA state convention in Spring 2017.
Death Note
This review will definitely be one I'll remember due to the preparation that went into making it. One of the main complaints of this film was how it didn't live up to the anime it was based on. So, I put both to the test. Not only did I watch the Netflix movie, Death Note, but I also watched all 37 episodes of the anime. After evaluating both pieces of media on their own merits, and then finding their connections, I came up with this review, a criticism of not just the film, but also of the criticism surrounding the film.
Stranger Things
Another review that had memorable preparation. I binged watched the entire second season of "Stranger Things" over the course of 12 hours (on the day it dropped on Netflix) to write this review. It was here that I truly began gaining my stride in review writing and finding my style. I weaved the information casual readers need to know about the series with my criticisms of this information, such as Noah Schnapp's performance as Will Byers.
Insatiable
This review is my most recent that I've done for The BluePrint. To challenge myself, I decided to review something seen as controversial. It ended up being "Insatiable," which from it's release had a reputation, people accusing it of fat-shaming, among other things. The show tested my ability to review a show on its own merits, and not let controversy taint it. However, I knew I had to address it in some way, so I did so in a way that seemed to be fair, and not alienating to those with differing opinions.