WJI Blog 2023, Ready, Set, Report!

Sunday marked our second day at WJI. After church, we embarked on a scavenger hunt to

explore Dordt University and the local town. Our assignment was to take selfies of our team

with a list of local attractions. We had big plans to win, so we strategically mapped our stops

and whipped around the grid of streets in Noah’s red Subaru Forester.

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We were proud of our efficient method: parking the car in front of the scavenger hunt item

while Leo, our designated photographer, dashed out to snap a selfie. We smiled out of the car

windows with the scavenger hunt item in the background. After the first few stops, I began

standing up to stick my head out of the sunroof for each picture.

For the Dordt section of the scavenger hunt, we took to foot. The buildings here are a maze;

after two full days, we’re still late to events because we can’t find the classrooms. Foiled by

locked doors and poor signage at every turn, we forced ourselves to run through sweat and

heartburn to finish. Ultimately, we took second place to WJI Director Lee Pitts and his children

(I’ll stay on Pitts’s good side here by leaving out the fact that he may have had an unfair

advantage— he designed the scavenger hunt).

After dinner, I crammed in some article editing before our movie night. We watched Spotlight,

a film about the Boston Globe’s 2002 story revealing widespread abuse and cover-up within the

Catholic Church. The journalists spend months chasing documents, knocking on doors, listening

with compassion, and pestering people in power— all things Professor Pitts says are true to

real-life journalism. We’ve spent time this weekend discussing Biblical journalism, and Spotlight

had similar themes of lifting up the voiceless and holding the powerful accountable. Apparently

Spotlight sometimes intimidates journalism students, but I was invigorated at the idea of

dusting off documents in a basement to find something no one else has noticed.

A few of us ended the night discussing Supreme Court case 303 Creative v. Elenis. WJI starts in

earnest on Monday, and our first event is a mock press conference with some attorneys

involved in the case. I’ve heard the best way to learn journalism is by doing it. Here at WJI

they’re doing just that: we’re jumping in and getting our hands dirty.

-Anne Shearer