This content copyright © Indiana University School of Journalism 2014
Journalism students spend time in class and in student media crafting everything from meeting stories to breaking news videos to longform feature stories. Some take as little as an hour; others may be year-long independent study projects.
What they learn from any of these projects is useful for those just beginning to study storytelling. School Web reporters Megan Jula, Janica Kaneshiro and Lena Morris spent time with three groups of students to learn more about how they developed stories, divided work among their teammates, and produced in-depth packages and projects.
Suspended Justice
By Lena Morris
Photo by Caitlin O'Hara
The grandmother of David Camm's two murdered children keeps their photos in a locket. Students reported on Camm's case for a semester-long multimedia project.
In October, national headlines were flooded with the trial of David Camm, a former Indiana state trooper convicted of the murders of his wife and two children. A new trial ended in acquittal for Camm, who had spent 13 years in prison, and the media coverage reconstructed the murders and analyzed the legal issues.
What the news didn’t report, however, was the family’s struggle in a community torn by controversy, and their coping with the loss of three loved ones to brutal crime.
“We really wanted to understand their lives, and let their community understand what these 13 years was like for them,” said senior Caitlin O’Hara, one among the team of three students in the Words and Pictures class who sought to report the story beyond the controversy.
Words and Pictures is the collaboration of students in three courses taught by professor of practice Tom French, associate professor Jim Kelly and lecturer Bonnie Layton. Students formed teams of three working as reporter, multimedia producer and photographer.
When seniors O’Hara, Katie Mettler and Missy Wilson first met as a team, they decided to approach the Camm family. They devoted the semester to telling the story of the families affected by the crime and the Indiana justice system.
“We didn’t want to cause them more pain, nor did we want to tell the same story that had been repeated for 13 years,” said Mettler, who was in French’s depth reporting class.
Mettler tweeted at Sam Lockhart, David Camm’s uncle and financial supporter of Camm’s defense. This brought the team in touch with the families, but they knew they had to work harder to get the full story.
“We wanted them to trust us with their story,” Mettler said. “Proving that we wanted to be there when the other reporters weren’t was the best way to gain that trust.”
Throughout the trial, the reporting team spent weekends in New Albany with the families, staying long after professional reporters had left, and weekdays covering the court hearings in Lebanon. The team split up in order to cover the trial and the reaction from the community at the same time.
Although each student had a different storytelling method, Wilson said they found themselves learning a lot about all the elements of storytelling.
“Working with Katie and Caitlin taught me so much about reporting, writing, photojournalism and journalism as a whole,” said Wilson, who specializes in design. “They inspired me to do the absolute best I could.”
Kelly, who teaches depth photojournalism, said the structure of the combined classes is designed to do just that – allow students to learn all aspects of storytelling through teamwork.
“We learned a lot about not only how reporters and photographers need to work together, but also how to create the synergy necessary to make really strong journalism,” he said.
Although experienced in student publications and professional internships, the three students said they’d never pursued depth reporting of this magnitude until the course. They not only struggled with getting people in the community to talk about a controversial topic, they had to simplify a criminal case entwined with legal jargon.
“We tried to study up on everything,” O’Hara said of the research into the case. “We watched everything we could about it, read all the old newspaper articles, and studied what everybody else had reported to find a way to go deeper.”
At the same time, the students had to balance their schoolwork and other activities while spending a lot of time traveling to the Boone County courthouse and spending weekends with Camm’s and his late wife’s family members.
“For anyone hoping to tackle a story like this, know that it is possible,” said O’Hara. “You just have to be flexible and creative with your time.”
Despite the challenges, the team said their instructors all provided support and were reachable at any time of the day. Although that also meant a lot of dedication for the instructors’ part, Layton said it was all worth it.
“I think when you see students working that hard, you feel like you need to be a part of that, to contribute back,” Layton said.
Already, the package, published in the Indiana Daily Student and online, has received several awards. Mettler won first place in the enterprise reporting competition in the Hearst Journalism Awards Program, and photographer Caitlin O’Hara won 14th in the program’s photojournalism competition. The team won first place for the package from Indiana Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist in the SPJ Region 5 Mark of Excellence awards.
Mettler said the class was unexpectedly challenging and time consuming, but she and her teammates agreed that the result was one of the most rewarding experiences in college.
“I learned more reporting this single story than I think I have learned at any other time since I’ve been at IU,” Mettler said. “Making mistakes is part of the process, and at the end of the day, I’m happy with what we put together.”
The Templeton Project
By Megan Jula
Courtesy photo
American Student Radio students interviewed Templeton Elementary students, who in turn worked on their own audio projects.
A project started as an American Student Radio summer story idea became a transmedia project involving journalism audio storytelling students and more than 100 elementary school students.
The Templeton Project, a website with audio interviews, interactivity, photos and stories, debuted during the last week of classes this spring and reflects a collaboration between IU journalism students and two elementary teachers and their unique class of students in grades kindergarten through sixth.
ASR, a national online storytelling website, features work from two of lecturer Sarah Neal-Estes’ classes and alumni of the courses.
Last summer, Neal-Estes’ heard about the class at Templeton Elementary in Bloomington where children from all seven grades function as one class. When she visited the school, one of the administrators remarked that the school was adding storytelling to its curriculum.
“I thought was fascinating because that’s what my work is all about,” said Neal-Estes, a former public radio reporter who teaches J460 Radio Innovation and J360 Audio Storytelling.
The idea caught ASR senior producer Bari Finkel’s attention, too.
“I was in town for the summer and so was American Student Radio co-president Allyssa Pollard,” she said. “We knew that we wanted to take another class with Sarah, so we pursued this as an independent study.”
The two teachers in the Templeton classroom, Risë Reinier and Kevin Gallagher, were enthusiastic about the project as well. Reiner and Gallagher have co-taught the class since 2002.
At first, Finkel and fellow students immersed themselves in the classroom, teaching audio reporting skills to the K-6 students. Their theme was “How do stories bring us together?”
“We went in taught them how to use Tascam and how to develop story structure,” she said.
At the same time, ASR students were interviewing, collecting information and sharing stories with students. Neal-Estes’ calls this “transmedia,” an extension of multimedia storytelling that extends to the audience, who can create work about themselves alongside the reporters.
So as Templeton students were interview subjects, they also were producing the own stories.
“I enjoyed teaching,” she said. “When I tell adults that I want to go into audio, they say ‘Why? You aren’t going to make any money.’ The kids just thought it was the coolest.“
Difficulties of the project included coordinating the large number of people involved and reporting in a school setting.
“It was a lot to orchestrate,” Finkel said. “It was a lot of students involved: in Sarah’s classes, plus 50-something children in the Templeton classroom.”
Working with children required permission slips from the children’s parents in order to record them or shoot photos or video of them.
“That delayed us for quite a bit,” Finkel explained. “It’s tricky with little kids. We’re still figuring out if we can use first and last names and pictures.”
Another adjustment throughout the reporting process was adapting the focus as the reporting evolved. Originally, the student journalists believed the story would look at Indiana’s education rating system.
“We went with that angle to the story, and what took away from it is much more about how alternative learning affects students,” Finkel said.
Different forms of media were crucial to the project, Neal Estes said. The online site for the project incorporates visuals, writing, audio and interactive graphics. Viewers can see the physical space in an interactive map, clicking on the quiet room. They can hear the young students telling their stories, can hear the teachers and the activities from gardening to recess.
The IU students also talked to alumni of the K-6 class to explore how this type of alternative classroom affects students long after they move on to more conventional situations.
“My students got a big production and design lesson, and learn about leading a team, leading a project,” Neal-Estes said. “It’s a lot more than just ‘ hey I made a podcast.”
Working on the year-long project required a lot of time management.
“It was definitely time consuming, but I loved doing it,” Finkel said. “I made time for it. We all did.”
She said she stuck with the project for almost an entire school year because she felt her work was having an impact.
“My advice would be make sure what you’re doing is meaningful to you,” she advised those considering in-depth projects. “If you’re working on a project you don’t feel a connection with, it’s going to be a lot harder. “
After the Fall
By Janica Kaneshiro
Photo by Anna Teeter
Rachael Fiege's mother maintains her late daughter's gravesite. IU students produced a package exploring the effects of Rachael Fiege's death from a fall.
For Emma Grdina, Anna Teeter and Jessica Contrera, telling the story of Rachael Fiege, a freshman who died during welcome week in August, began over burritos at Chipotle.
As students in Words and Pictures, they had met to develop story ideas they could pursue all semester. Fiege’s death Aug. 24 was on their minds, as the Zionsville native had been on campus only two days before her death from a fall down a flight of stairs at an off-campus house.
“We were given the assignment to come up with three stories we could pursue all semester,” Grdina said.
Words and Pictures, co-taught last fall by professors Jim Kelly, Tom French and Bonnie Layton, brought students from in-depth reporting, photojournalism and multimedia to collaborate on semester-long projects.
For the Fiege piece, this team first created a Powerpoint to describe the story to the class the following week. They immediately got to work, Contrera on writing, Teeter on photography and Grdina on multimedia development.
As so often happens with a project, the focus shifted as they started their groundwork. They initially wanted to tell the story from the perspective of the friends of Fiege. The friends declined, saying the tragedy was too fresh in their minds.
“Her friends were in fragile states,” Contrera said of the decision to switch focus of the story. “The person who was able to let us in the most was her mom. We are so in debt to her family.”
Two or three at a time, the journalists visited Fiege’s home town of Zionsville at least once a week for the rest of the semester, talking with Fiege’s parents and friends.
“We also met every Monday,” Grdina said of their strategy to continually refine the direction the story was taking and to determine other aspects of what would be a large package.
As the story evolved, each worked solo on different tasks, often guided by the current news. Fiege’s death shone a light on the campus parties and the concept of calling for help without risk of legal trouble.
Teeter created short videos and took photographs to illustrate the IU drinking culture.
Grdina went to informational interviews at IU’s Counseling and Psychological Services, and she interviewed experts about the Saferide project and the Lifeline Law, passed in 2012 to provide immunity to those who seek medical assistance for an individual in an alcohol-related health emergency. She dissected the laws to explain students’ rights.
Grdina and Teeter created a website so the package could be published in print and online.
Meanwhile, Contrera focused on telling Fiege’s mother’s story.
They decided on a deadline for the story to be published in the Indiana Daily Student and online before the end of the semester so that Fiege’s story, begun before classes started, would be explained before the semester ended.
“We thought it would make the greatest impact that way,” Contrera said.
They decided on “After the Fall” as the title of the piece to honor Fiege as more than just the freshman who fell down the stairs, Teeter said.
As time ticked down to the end of the semester, the group began meeting more often. They began referring to the time left not in weeks or days but in “sleeps.”
“Two weeks is scary, but 14 sleeps is manageable,” Grdina said.
Each time they met, they made long to-do lists filled with fact-checking, coding or interview reminders.
Just two days before “After the Fall” ran, Grdina, Teeter and Contrera assembled everything they had. They printed out sections and laid them out to see what they had.
“We aligned everything,” Contrera said, “all story sections, all the photos and all the multimedia.”
On the night before “After the Fall” ran, the trio stayed in the IDS newsroom until 4:30 a.m. polishing the story and the website.
The following day, Contrera said she slept most of the day away, not only from the long hours but also because the emotional toll the project had taken.
“It was the most emotional experiences any of us have had, I think,” Contrera said. “We were just so blessed they let us in and trusted us to tell their daughter’s story in the context of such a complex, complicated thing.”
Whenever a story runs, journalists often wish they had had more time, had had more space to include every detail they’ve collected, Grdina said. But the team’s goal of raising awareness on these issues was achieved, she said.
“We all had different goals in this,” Grdina said. “I just wanted people to know this could happen to anybody. This is a big problem, and here are some solutions that could prevent it.”
But the story stays with each of them because they got to know a student they could never meet.
“All of us still think about it every day,” Contrera said. “What got to me the most were times when I was not working on the story, when I was going out or going to football games or other IU events. This person I never knew, she would never get to have that.”
Update: The package was a finalist for the Society of Professional Journalists' Region 5 Mark of Excellence awards.
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