ARTICLE WRITING
I'd say that in the last four years as a journalism major, I've probably created more articles than I can bear to count. However, here are some of the ones I'm particularly proud of, both published and for school.
Published Works
The R.O.S.E. article was the biggest article I wrote while I was at the High Country Press. It was featured in their July magazine and took up a total of eleven pages, telling the story of Appalachian State's solar racing team and the newest car they had built, R.O.S.E. It was a difficult article to write, in part because I interviewed so many people, but also because it was such an important and exciting story. I took as much time as I could with this one, to make sure I told the story right, and that it was worthy both of them and of the magazine. I also wrote a follow-up story when they came back from the race with second place!
This article was originally written with a partner, Finn Halloran, for our Specialized Reporting class. It was early April, and we decided that we wanted to write our assignment about local businesses during the pandemic, and see if we could bring them some customers during those trying times. So, after getting permission from our professor, we wrote the article and later submitted it to the High Country Press. Halloran also constructed a detailed infographic to accompany the story. The real challenge of this article was finding the balance between encouraging people to support local without putting themselves at risk.
This article is similar to the one above: Finn Halloran and I wrote it both for our class and for the High Country Press. As the title suggests, it discusses the effects that online classes had on the study habits of App State students. I also constructed an infographic to accompany this article, which examined further the effects Coronavirus had on students' personal lives. The infographic is probably one of the better things I've created in Canva, and I was excited for a chance to improve my graphic design skills.
This article was probably the most enjoyable one I wrote while I was at the High Country Press. There were just so many people who were eager to help me tell this story, of how the 47th Annual Roasting of the Hog came to be. I got so invested in it that I actually crafted replica invitations from the original event, back in 1972, and gave them to the founding members. Writing and designing this article for both print and the web helped me gain experience in crafting an entire piece from start to finish.
This is an article from a column that I created while I worked for High Country Press called "Daily Tunes: The Outdoor Music Scene." Every day, I would find an outdoor music event that was happening in the High Country and write a short little blurb about it. These were really fun to write because they presented me an opportunity to be a bit more creative in my article writing.
Schoolwork
I wrote this article about local poet Thom Young with, yet again, Finn Halloran, for our Spring 2020 Specialized Reporting class. Writing this article presented a unique challenge for me; I found much of Young's poetry to be personally offensive. However, I had to set my personal biases aside for the sake of writing a fair story. I also created an infographic for this story, about literary clubs on campus. Unfortunately, it ended up being more like a brochure. It was well-designed but just not the format and style we wanted for our article.
I wrote this article for my Introduction to Journalism class way back in Spring of 2018, and I have to say, for such a long time ago, it's held up pretty well. It's about Foggy Pine Books and how they're holding up as an independent bookstore. This article was actually the first time I had used a real camera to take pictures, and they turned out incredible. I do wish I had interviewed a bit more people for this story, but I would say for one of my first "real" articles, this was written fairly well.
This was another promotional article, this time for one of my clubs: Catholic Campus Ministry. I wrote it for my Feature Writing class in Spring of 2019, and it helped me gain experience with gathering a lot of information and then selecting which information to include in the final product. The magazine layout pictured here was eventually published in the High Country Press, but the original article was for my class.