Today I braved the cold, drenching rain to cover a student protest on the college campus. In spite of the weather, about thirty two students arrived and I recorded some wonderful interviews with students and administration alike.
As soon as the students dispersed to classes and dry shelter, I ran back to the newsroom and possibly beat my record for quickest assembled article.
I feel like a lot of what we do at the college paper, as well as on blogs is just recycling stories that other people have already written. Maybe getting a new perspective or doing extra research, but it's still a lot of sitting in front of a computer. It's not often we get to break something completely fresh and I love it when we do. That's the grass roots, "hard-core" journalism students dream of. Imagining, as Tom Stoppard put it "lying on the floor of an African airport while machine-gun bullets zoomed over my typewriter."
Though not quite to that level, or even to the level protests from my parents' day reached- the tear gas of the Vietnam era- it still felt good to be reporting something live. Whether the protest had the effect the students wished remains to be seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment