Articles

People write on the pavement what their affordable housing needs are at a rally to bring housing back to Washington, D.C.

Here is a small sampling of clips from various publications. For more, see the links below.

Although I've done a variety of jobs so far in my budding career as a journalist, my strength is writing. It has always been my focus and my passion. I believe it is important to have a diverse skill set, but not at the expense of having a focus. Long-form writing is that focus for me.

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A lot of reporting time went into the production of this story for Vox Magazine. My goal was to capture day-to-day life at Blue Acres trailer park amidst the redevelopment of trailer parks in the area. Finding real stories in Steve's living room took a lot of patience. Sometimes I would have two or three conversations with my sources in order to understand one aspect of their stories. The extra time I spent in the park was worth the effort.

This story grew out of a bunch of my other stories. After a few weeks of working with Street Sense, it became very obvious that the main contributor to homelessness in D.C. was the lack of affordable housing. New stories of waiting and wondering came my way as I swiveled through crowds in soup kitchens, emergency shelters and day shelters. I wanted to visually show the individual stories meshing with the larger policy story through my layout. However, I also wanted to give the impression that these stories are just a few of the thousands of people looking for a better housing option.

I helped make an international issue a local story in this article about a panel discussion on the people's uprising in Libya. My job was to make Libya news for a small town in mid-Missouri. The local high school provided the perfect opportunity. The high school lobby was filled with flags of countries where its students are from, including Libya, and the monthly group discussion was focused on the "Arab Spring."

Berrywood Forest is cherished by the residents of the area surrounding it in Columbia, Mo. It was threaten after the local owners of the land sold it to an out-of-state developer. I stumbled across the struggle to save the forest while I was a neighborhoods beat reporter at the Columbia Missourian. The ward councilman for that part of town let it slip that a private owner was working on buying the forest in order to save it.

I was on deadline when I got this story about Kony2012, the video about Sudanese children that went viral. A new reporter was covering a showing of the video that day, and it was my job to put that story in the context of the discussion around the video. I created this storify with videos and articles by people on all sides of the debate. It shows the story of the Kony2012 video unfold.

I had the opportunity to work with a few local papers while I was studying abroad in Pune, India. Reporting in a foreign country presents some difficulties. Luckily, I knew some Hindi, which helped me get accurate information from my sources. But I had to completely re-work my normal reporting process in order to contact people so that they felt comfortable with me. I often found myself text messaging sources to establish the initial contact because most people felt uneasy about cold calls. However, the challenges actually made the whole experience more fun, and I learned that I absolutely love being thrown into new and difficult environments.

At the Columbia Missourian, writing obituaries is part of the daily grind. Our obituaries, also called "life stories," required calling the families for more anecdotal information about the deceased person. I was amazed how quickly people started opening up to a perfect stranger on the phone if the right questions are asked. Of course, I also got a lot of tears and grief-caused anger while making those phone calls, but it was worth it for the wealth of in-depth stories.

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