No. 12 - Nearing the end of J4804: a reflection

As I come upon my last deadline day, I decided to reflect upon the reporting I have done up to this point.

My first two subjects were pretty heavy. I reported on conversion therapy and suicide. I do wish that my group would have been able to make a product that could have been published for our first story.

There was a fair amount of coverage on the topic, because a proposed ban on the practice on minors was passed in the city council. We started our reporting on the issue before it was first heard at city council. We looked at how the practice played out in Columbia, and we talked to a lot of the people who were pushing for practice to be banned. However, we did not get the perspective from places that were actually practicing conversion therapy.

I have looked at the coverage that was actually done on the issue, and from the Missourian and KOMU it was on the passing of the bill. KBIA did some coverage of the passing of the ordinance as well as some coverage about the issue before the vote.

Even AP provided coverage on the issue because Columbia was the first city in Missouri to pass a ban. The article from AP touched on the topic of preemption of the city ordinance from the state government, but it did not fully explain it. That was another angle to the story that my team did that I found intriguing.

What I really appreciated that my team did was that we had in depth interviews with multiple people who went through conversion therapy, and I really wanted to get published so that we could tell their stories. Those sources trusted us to share really personal and difficult stories about periods in their life that were horrible for them. There was one source in particular that I thought it was really special that they opened up to us. I was excited to see they got up publicly at the October 7th city council meeting.

I think that one of things that will never stop surprising me is the information that people are willing to share with me. People understand the value of their stories, and they want to connect with others who could be going through the same thing as them.

The story about survivors of loss was another story where I was shocked by the amount that people were open to having us in their homes and what they shared with us.

This was one of the first video stories that I had done on a topic that wasn’t inherently visual. At first, I struggled how to tell this story visually. I would say that we were all guilty of thinking about the past events, which we could not capture. We had to rethink about how we could capture what is happening now and relate it to the hardships they had previously faced. I think that learning how to tell that type of story visually was the biggest lesion that I got out of that unit.

The story that we did tell used the news peg of the Out of the Darkness, so I looked at some of the local coverage of that. For Columbia this year I was only about to find coverage from the Paul Pepper show.

There was an article from the Southeast Missourian about a different walk in Missouri that provided similar coverage to what my group ended up doing. Our group initially wanted to cover suicide contagion. Then we switched to survivors of loss, but a common criticism of our project was that we didn’t show enough surviving.

I would like to think that for the third installment we all really understood how each element should interact with each other. While we did run into some issues at the beginning of deadline day with some missing background information from the package, I do think that we were able to create a package where each element complemented each other instead of just being variations of the same story. I feel like the my second package the elements were almost too closely related.

Anyways, I hope that I have shown that I have actually learned something over this class. It was definitely a lot of work, but it did teach me a lot.