charlieardengee
Investigative Reporting
Indigenous in ICCSD
Design by Ella Rosenthal
This piece is the work I am most proud of in the entirety of my journalistic career. Being able to hear from Indigenous students about their experiences in our school district was truly an honor. I personally feel like Indigenous voices are all too often not listened to and disregarded, and having their stories be the focus of our cover story was important to me. Indigenous students make up a very small demographic of the population at our school, so it was challenging at first finding sources, but it was so, so worth it in the end. My co-writers and I worked very well together. We all worked on writing at the same time and split the work evenly.
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The story also lined up perfectly with the district's restructuring of the history curriculum. I hope to see the changes that Indigenous students in this story asked for over the next few years as their plan is implemented. Regardless, I feel like this story made a huge impact by giving lots of information and resources about Indigenous people and how to respect them. It won a Best of SNO and was IHSPA's 2021 First Place Multimedia Feature Story.
Viral.
Design by Vivien Ho
All the way back in February of 2020, the West Side Story editorial board had selected the novel coronavirus as a cover story for the upcoming April issue. Our angle was how the outbreak in China was affecting students in Iowa City all the way across the ocean. This was anything from how students with families there were feeling, to dance teams having to reschedule their competitions because of costume backorders from worker shortages, to how small businesses in Iowa City with shipments coming from China would be affected. Obviously, a lot changed over the next few months.
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This story was my first experience with fast-paced news reporting. New developments in the outbreak were happening every day, so much so that we had to completely scrap our previous draft because none of it was relevant anymore. While my peers were downloading TikTok and baking bread, I was conducting phone interviews all throughout the beginning of the pandemic. So much changed that the final draft only includes about half of them. I poured my heart and soul into this cover story, writing most of the draft and creating multimedia aspects for the web version for the first time. It won a Best of SNO and was IHSPA 2021's Second Place In-Depth News Story.
Grades, friends, competition: They stress our high schoolers more than you might think
I have been part of a team of student journalists working with investigative news outlet Iowa Watch twice now. This particular article was my first of the sort. Being in my sophomore year, I was the youngest person on the team. At first, I was a little intimidated. We were each supposed to collect 6 interviews and headshots of our sources in about a month. Between four people, that was a lot of interviews. We had to coordinate source ideas and make sure we didn't cover the same person twice. We met at a local coffee shop to write together. It was a great opportunity to learn from fellow writers, all of whom were or would become editor-in-chief. If I would change anything, I think I could've gotten more out of my interviews and pushed a little deeper. However, I feel like I really did grow from the process and am proud of the final product. The piece was republished in The Gazette, the Press-Citizen, and the Des Moines Register.