Although I have not taken many journalism classes, I appreciate experimenting with journalistic writing because it allows me to write with another audience in mind and involve activism in my writing. I wrote these two pieces in my last semester at WFU and they serve as a reminder that I am still learning new writing techniques.
For my WRI 350 class, I was assigned the task of repurposing something I had written for a new audience. I decided to convert my anthropology research paper "Outdoor Spaces in the Media: How Racialized Outdoor Identities are Perpetuated on Instagram" to a shorter, more accessible piece of journalism that you might find in a popular journal like The Atlantic. I enjoyed writing this piece because I was able to take what I had learned through my research and write about it in my own voice. Unconfined by the expectations of an academic research paper, I wrote candidly and boldly about inequality in outdoor media. The challenge here was figuring out how much of my original paper to include, which relied heavily on anthropological theory and an extensive literature review. I still introduced theory into this version, but I believe I was able to do so in a way that is accessible to a public audience.
This photo essay is my contribution to a collective endeavor by my Environmental Journalism class to highlight the Boston-Thurmond neighborhood in Winston-Salem. Our class divided into production teams each focusing on a different issue such as food insecurity, education, infrastructure, and housing. I initially designed this story on the farmland adjacent to Boston-Thurmond to be about food insecurity, but as I interviewed residents, I realized that it could be about a lot more. Ultimately, my story is about the importance of public space, recreation, and community collaboration. I got feedback from a lot of Boston-Thurmond residents while writing this story and I let their quotes drive the essay, making my writing process different than usual. I am happy with how it turned out and I appreciate that this story allowed me to learn about an important community in Winston-Salem while also learning how to write in a new genre.