News gathering
Much of my basic news gathering comes from board meeting videos, board policy, the student handbook or legal documents such as the Pupil Privacy Rights Act. I still prefer to print out these documents and text-mark them in my signature colored pen so I can truly comprehend them. Below are examples of my notes from these documents or the actual text-marking.
FOIAs
Presented to me in my sophomore year as the "journalistic f-bomb", FOIAs have become one of my specialized subject areas. Although I have not submitted many of my own, I often help others submit theirs. To the right is a FOIA I submitted to our school district regarding athletic code violations. Below is an email to a Journalism 1 student about submitting a FOIA regarding club sponsors' stipends and other data gathering. I am a frequent user of SPLC's FOIA letter generator and have pushed my staff to use it as well.
Informal Data Gathering
For a more recent story, I sifted through our athletic code as well as all the other codes of schools in our conference. (The codes are pictured on the bottom left.) We didn't publish this story, but it is an accurate representation of the data gathering I do on a regular basis.
​
Bottom right is the chicken scratch I like to call pre-story notes. I debated writing some color coded easy-to-read notes so it would look nice, but in the spirit of journalism I want to be transparent. These are notes for a brief about temporary air conditioning units the school installed at the beginning of the year. The questions are more easily read, but I insert random information I find along the way. In more complicated subjects, I usually have arrows indicating predicted follow up question. My notes don't usually make sense to others, but they help me. For example, under the circled 10 is just the word "Aggreko," which is the parent company for the units. It's also common to find little notes to myself everywhere (lunchbox, chalk board, Google doc, etc.) such as the note at the bottom to email the parent company.
​
