Training Through the Tulips: Saturday, May 18, 2024

Josephine Lee from The Master's University

Saturday marked not only our first day of reporting on the ground at WJI, but our first full writing assignment. We had been well-prepared by Director Pitts’ battle-rousing pep talks all weekend, and I was itching to get on the field.

During the afternoon portion of the Tulip Festival, I was keen to do a little dilly-dallying, since the bulk of my reporting seemed to be over. I paid a visit to a local coffee shop, bought some African beads at a world market, and watched Dutch festivities at the 1 o’clock parade. But as the floats and marching bands went by, I remembered some pieces of information I’d forgotten to get from my source, so I hurried back to her booth and caught another, brief interview.

As with many of the other WJIers, Saturday was my first time selecting and interviewing a source without any prior preparation. I definitely need more experience to be able to successfully filter through what questions are important to ask in the moment; in the real world, one doesn’t always get the opportunity for a second interview.

Besides being necessary for our stories, I think the most significant benefit of the Tulip Festival was that it gave us a great taste of Orange City – and by extension, Sioux Center – culture. Our pumps are now well-primed to successfully advance into future reporting opportunities here.

The day was far from over, though. After a brief respite in the afternoon, we hurried to the classroom for another journalism session with Pitts, this time on the 3rd element of the journalistic process: analysis. We surveyed our notes to select the most relevant material for our stories – important quotes, conflict, narrative. I found this session challenging, as I rarely stretch out the thought process behind my writing in this way. I was, as they say, raring to go. But the process of solidifying an outline and identifying both the critical and unnecessary elements of the story helped my later writing process to go by smoothly.

After our session ended, we took another short break for dinner. At 7pm, we headed back into the classroom, where Pitts released us to our keyboards for an hour of barf-drafting: getting our rough draft onto the page. The time limit proved pressurizing, but it pushed me to get things done.

With a few sessions of peer-review, caffeinated drinks, and editing, we each had a finished draft completed by midnight. All in all, completing the reporting-writing-editing cycle in one day was strenuous, but it was also very rewarding and gave us a strong dose of real journalism.