Dear BHS,

My final journalism project is a podcast discussing the change from last year’s hybrid learning to this year’s less restricted/almost back to normal school year. This podcast demonstrates my skills as a journalist in three main different ways; interviewing, storytelling and reporting, and understanding of journalistic ethics. When it comes to interviewing, this podcast helps to demonstrate my skills by showing that I am able to contact and schedule interviews efficiently for timing and content, and by displaying strong and elaborate answers from my interviewees, this podcast proves that I am able to craft good questions that get interviewees to give the information that I am seeking for my topic.

For understanding of newsworthiness, this podcast demonstrates that I am able to report on relevant topics in an interesting way. These topics possess elements such as relevance, timeliness, proximity, human interest, prominence, novelty, and impact. For this project in particular, I took a lot of time considering different topics to focus on in order to make sure it was something with a lot of newsworthiness; the topic I chose has proximity as it is about BHS with a BHS audience, it has human interest because the story holds a lot of emotion and opinion which people often find intriguing, it has relevance because it addresses topics that took over the lives of everyone at one point, and it has timeliness because the year is coming to an end meaning students and faculty are starting to look back on the year and reflect upon it. Those are four ways that this podcast is newsworthy, helping to show that I have a strong understanding of it.

As for storytelling skills, this podcast shows how I used facts and statistics along with personal stories/opinions and how I was able to organize them in a way that gets my focus across without trailing into other topics. Simultaneously, I incorporated appropriate music, sound effects, and silence in impactful ways to put emphasis on, develop emotion, and/or switch topics. All of these factors prove that I am able to produce a coherent story in an interesting way because I am able to provide the facts and still add fun aspects that keep the audience engaged.

Lastly, this podcast helps to display my understanding of journalistic ethics because it portrays how I am able to craft and produce a story that includes enough information to make the story personal to the interviewees while still making it vague enough that nothing is exposed about them that they did not want to disclose or that could put them in danger. Overall, this final project demonstrated my skills that I have learned throughout journalism class in many different ways.

Sincerely,

Emma Cerasoli