Race/Community Reporting: My final project

I didn’t want to take my Race/Community reporting class. I couldn’t see why this was a required class and the class I wanted to take instead, on website building, was just an elective. While my future job might depend on my programming abilities, who wants a white woman to write their race beat?

Well, Race/Community was about so much more than that. It taught me to look beyond labels and provided me with tools to tell peoples’ stories in genuine ways, minus the judgment that sometimes seeps in to this kind of reporting. Overall, it’s the most valuable course I took this semester.

I focused most of my work in the class on local young people with Muscular Dystrophy. You can find two excerpts from my final on American Observer here and here. My total piece was over 3500 words! So when it came time to create the multimedia part of my piece, I focused on why this project was important to me. And some of you who know me already know why: my amazing boyfriend John lost his brother to the disease.

This April, a park was opened in John’s hometown of Harrisonburg, Virginia, in memory of his brother. I covered the event from a personal angle in the video below. It’s a very different approach from my usually removed, journalistic angle. Do you like it better than my usual work? Check it out below: