Reporting
Reporting is my favorite part of journalism. I love reporting because it's given me the opportunity to connect with my community and learn about the world around me through interviews, research and events. I get excited about reporting in person for things like campaign events, election day coverage, community festivals and marches, but I also love conducting thorough online research and sitting down with sources for more personal interviews.
FAIRLIE MERCER
At the Harris campaign's Election Eve party, I interviewed attendees and local icons including radio personality, DJ and journalist Frank Ski. I also saw speeches by politicians and celebrities including Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and performances by various musical artists. Attending this event in person gave me valuable insight into the feelings of Atlanta Democrats heading into the election, which helped improve the depth of both the story I wrote about the Election Eve party and the other election coverage I did during the week.
Idea Generation
I pay attention to school announcements, local events and global news to find ideas for stories. Every time I come up with one, I add it to my story schedule with details about the angle for the story, the relevance to my audience, and anything else I can think of. Then, I put my idea for the images I want. By thinking through the details of the story, I figure out what events I need to attend, people I need to contact and whether I need to request press passes or not.
At the Southerner, we have pitch meetings about every two weeks, then have a week to write a draft and a week to get the story edited by three people. This process ensures that we have enough content to keep our website updated and print a monthly newspaper, but I have found it somewhat limiting. Most students just pitch their two articles a month and don't realize that they can extend beyond that.
Gathering story ideas and information around the clock instead of just once every two weeks helps me pick up useful information. For example, in August, my school introduced a new phone policy, and my AP Research teacher showed us the presentation from their staff meeting with statistics about the policy's effects and data from a teacher survey about phone usage. I was able to get access to these materials and write a story supporting the policy at a time where most students were severely lacking information.
Having ongoing curiosity and keeping a personal writing schedule make it possible to publish often. I am encouraging our staff to keep their own personal writing schedules, as it takes the pressure off of pitch day and would help us have more content and increase our coverage of breaking news.
PITCH SHEET
STORY SCHEDULE
This is the schedule of all the stories I have planned for the second semester so far. Each idea has specific details about events I need to attend; points I want to focus on and images I need to take, obtain or design
PLANNING DOCUMENT
This is the planning document for a news story about the death of Former President Jimmy Carter. My publication ran a story about him a few years back, so I made sure to plan this story with that in mind and minimize overlap.
Story Planning
Once I start working on a story, I make a document in SNO FLOW and dump all of my ideas in. Next, I…
-
conduct preliminary research on my topic
-
list potential interviewees
-
list events related to the story with dates/times/locations to attend
-
find previous coverage from my publication on the topic
-
map out important points I want to highlight
-
make plans for images
For opinion stories, I start with a brief outline listing the points I plan to cover in my story and areas for deeper research.
COMMENT OUTLINE
This is an outline for a comment story about gender differences in concussion research. I always start my comment stories with an ordered list of topics I want each of my paragraphs to focus on.
Then, I send press inquiries out to anyone I want to interview and get any tickets or press passes I need for the story.
Next, I plan out some interview questions in the google doc. For collaborative stories, it's especially important to write down important questions ahead of time to make sure everyone is on the same page about the focus of our interviews.
INTERVIEW PLANNING
This is an in-progress list of interview questions for a news story about the Syrian liberation. For this story, we wanted to introduce the Syrian Civil War in an accessible way for readers who weren't very familiar while highlighting the pain the regime caused and exploring what's next for Syria.
HARRIS-WALZ TEAM
On Oct. 27, at a Harris rally in Clayton County, I met Maya Harris, Vice President Kamala Harris's sister. I also saw Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff speak and interviewed several state representatives and campaign volunteers. This helped me learn about Democratic goals and strategies in the 2024 election.
Reporting in the Field
I have spent countless, evenings, weekends and school breaks exploring my city and meeting people through the lens of a camera and a voice recorder. By attending events in person, I can capture the energy in my stories and get a better understanding of public opinion.
AUDREY LYONS
I helped my friend report for a story about Atlanta Pride and when we interviewed a classmate about her Pride plans, she mentioned an event called Pride On the Square. We attended the event that night and had fun talking to attendees, taking photos, and watching drag performances.
AUDREY LYONS
On Oct. 19, I attended my first election event of the season, a Kamala Harris rally at Lakewood Amphitheater, south of Atlanta. There, I saw the vice president speak about goals for her potential term and ways for the audience to get involved in the campaign. After she left, I interviewed several attendees about their experience at the rally and their most important issues in the election.
On Oct. 28, I covered a Donald Trump rally at Georgia Tech. I saw the former president speak to a crowd of supporters and students and interviewed several attendees to learn what issues they cared about most and which of Trump's policies were most impactful in their voting decisions.
AUDREY LYONS
On Nov. 3, I attended a rally at the Cobb Galleria Centre, where I saw Vice President Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, speak, along with Doug Emhoff, several Georgia Democratic leaders and musical guests including Aaron Dessner and Jon Bon Jovi. Here, I interviewed many Harris supporters and learned their personal connections to political issues.
AUDREY LYONS
On election night, I attended the Democratic Party's Atlanta watch party, where I saw speeches from prominent Georgia politicians. Interviews brought out fears of a Trump win causing a backslide toward Jim Crow days and hope from a member of Workers United that a Harris win would be empowering for workers and unions. Later that night in our newsroom, I tracked election results and collaborated with my colleagues and editors-in-chief to write real-time update stories.
AUDREY LYONS
On Election Day, I covered Atlanta’s DJs at the Polls program. There was no online information about where the DJs were, so I drove around to 13 different polling sites, looking and listening for DJ tables. I left for the polls at 7 a.m., had countless interesting conversations and photo opportunities, and posted the last story of the night at 1 a.m. It was the most exhausting, but rewarding day of my journalistic career.
FAIRLIE MERCER
My election coverage was featured in the "Best of Best of SNO" newsletter, where the Best of SNO reviewers highlight standout submissions from the month. My reporting style made the Trump and Harris rally stories particularly strong because my co-authors and I interviewed over a dozen attendees for each story to effectively capture public opinion heading into the election.
Interviews
I like to say that if your interviews are good enough, your stories will write themselves. When I reported my first story, a feature on a local ice cream shop, my interviews were terrible. I just read through my short, pre-planned list of questions and never asked the sources to elaborate on their answers. When I sat down to write the story, I realized that I hardly had any usable quotes.
Over time, I integrated my humanity into the interviewing process and learned to engage with and adapt to sources. Instead of reading a list of questions with a predetermined idea of the quotes I want, I let the source drive the interview and share the story they want to share.
Now, I can have meaningful interviews that capture my community's perspectives in an authentic way. This improves the quality of my stories and makes my job as a writer much easier and more fun.
TIM WALZ RALLY
Click here to listen to me turn this woman's one-word interview responses into relevant quotes about the importance of campaign events and her vision for the future of America
INTERVIEW RECORDINGS
2022
Most of my first interviews consisted of under two minutes of awkwardness. You can tell from my voice that I was uncomfortable talking to strangers, which hindered the interviewees' abilities to give thorough answers.
2024
Through years of experience, my interview process has become second nature. I am comfortable approaching strangers in public and peers and teachers at school and can easily adapt my line of questioning in response to their answers.
I also love having longer, more personal interviews with key sources for in-depth stories. My favorite interview was for my story about the Syrian liberation. I interviewed a Rwan Hayek, a graduate from my school who talked about her experiences visiting Syria as a child and what the end of the regime meant to her family. During our 20-minute long interview, I learned that because of the intense censorship under the Assad regime, she hadn't been able to speak freely on the phone with her extended family in 13 years. She showed me that global news stories that seem distant and irrelevant to some can hit close to home for others in my community.
SYRIA FEATURE
This is an excerpt from my feature on the Syrian Liberation. My interview with Midtown graduate Rwan Hayek helped me learn how much Syrian censorship impacted people in my community. Hayek's perspective was valuable to the emotional feel of the story.
Reporting for Comment Stories
Some of my most time consuming reporting has taken place in my bedroom, scrolling through hundreds of pages of pdfs or watching extensive interviews.
For my story on Vice President Kamala Harris's change in campaign strategy, I watched her interviews for CBS's 60 minutes, Fox News and Call Me Daddy, in addition to researching highlights from other interviews. This time-consuming reporting helped me develop a comprehensive opinion story using a wide range of evidence. It also helped me learn more about Harris's campaign platform, which was helpful for the rest of my election coverage.
I got the idea for my story on gender discrepancies in concussion research from an Instagram video, then read through studies and medical research from the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the National Library of Medicine and more. My limited medical knowledge made this challenging, but I was mostly focused on finding the demographic data from commonly cited concussion research, which just required patience and determination.