My best story

Written for an internship application:

She was still in high school, living with her baby in a trailer without electricity in a rural area of the Mississippi Delta. How did I, a middle-class white intern from a Jesuit university in Omaha find myself interviewing this woman? Simple. I was writing a series on infant mortality that eventually won the Louisiana-Mississippi AP Managing Editors award for interpretive writing. It was an indelible growing experience for a reporter.

It was part of my first internship at the Vicksburg Post, where I covered everything from a trial of a Ku Klux Klansman to dog shows. At the Post, I wrote my best story: “Hope Amid Despair,” a three-part series on infant mortality in Mississippi. While writing daily news stories, I was given six weeks to work on this on the side. I spent hours interviewing people who were all in different situations trying to find out why the babies died, and if anyone was at fault.

This story taught me how to tell individual stories to point out a bigger concern. I collected information on agencies helping low income families find assistance and highlighted efforts to combat the epidemic.

Mississippi is accustomed to being last in many categories: last in healthcare, last in income, first in diabetes and infant mortality. In this story I was able to point out a problem while highlighting the steps that state government was taking steps to make it better.

Writing this series was also a lesson in time management and organization. Agencies gave me binders of information about case studies and statistics, and I made sure I could rapidly find what I needed. While I was writing this story, I was also driving 60 miles every day to Jackson to cover a murder trial. I had to find time in the day to report on the trial while setting up interviews and researching infant mortality.

Since then, I interned at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer writing arts and feature stories. I also spent a semester working on a multimedia piece on Creighton in 1968, where I interviewed former students and professors on the 40th anniversary of the year Bobby Kennedy made a historic speech on campus, George Wallace caused a riot in downtown Omaha and Creighton students were arrested in the streets of Chicago. I wrote the story and edited video clips for the Internet.

“Hope Amid Despair” only strengthened my resolve to be a reporter. I hope to do more in-depth coverage and investigative reporting and I’ll work every day to write good, solid stories.