I pitched, wrote, and produced data visualizations for this multimedia story on bat population loss in Texas and its impacts. For the story, I talked to over 15 different bat experts and visited bat sites across the state in order to understand how scientists were combatting the loss and the lack of historical data collection. Using Illustrator, I made a graphic with over 500 little bat SVGs in order to demonstrate the population change over time.
I pitched this story to my editor after a new Climate Central report was released on how the city has been growing warmer. I knew I wanted to do a story that touched on the magnitude of the climate crisis, but struggled to figure out the news peg that would captivate readers. Too often readers just ignore any story that touches on climate change, so it’s challenging to figure out how to continue reporting on the issue in an interesting way that people care about.
As I researched this article I uncovered how the loss of the tree canopy and its resulting urban heating disproportionally impacts lower income communities. I broadened the story into a larger piece addressing health inequities associated with more heat.
After the article was published, the piece got picked up by a local news TV station who interviewed me about my reporting — something no other intern has done in company history. I’m also quite proud of the headline — I proposed it to my editor as a joke, but we ended up using it in the final piece. It avoids the use of any scientific or clinical language that could alienate readers off-the-bat from reading the environmentally-driven piece.
For this piece, I drove around the city visiting over ten different car inspections shops in the area. I wanted to talk to a wide variety of shop owners to get an idea of the common problems people face going into car inspections. Through talking to these shop owners, I discovered that there were some pandemic-specific issues that were giving people trouble with their inspections, something not a lot of people knew about when they got their car inspected. I also took the photos and video for this piece.
I caught wind of this story from Twitter and immediately pitched it to my editor. The issue gets right to the core of why I find journalism so valuable: being able to tell those untold stories. I spent hours combing through legal documents and talking with the family’s hired representative to stitch together the events of the RDU incident — but I wanted to expand the story further. In talking with transgender community members, I discovered that this “isolated incident” wasn’t that unusual. There are structural inequalities in the development of TSA scanners that cause them to disproportionally register false positives for transgender passengers. I worked to build relationships with LGBTQ+ community members around me so that other transgender students would be willing to share their experiences with me. I also researched data to help contextualize the issue on a national scale.
For this piece, I drove around the city visiting over ten different car inspections shops in the area. I wanted to talk to a wide variety of shop owners to get an idea of the common problems people face going into car inspections. Through talking to these shop owners, I discovered that there were some pandemic-specific issues that were giving people trouble with their inspections, something not a lot of people knew about when they got their car inspected. I also took the photos and video for this piece.
This was one of my favorite stories to work on during my summer in Charlotte. I visited Dawn Reid and toured her beehives, taking the photos and videos for the article. It was interesting to dig into the hypocrisy of such a pushback to beekeeping taking place in a designated bee city. Reporting on this piece was challenging, especially when the neighbors quite literally closed the door in my face when I tried to talk to them. It was tricky to figure out how to tell a balanced story when the “other side” refused to talk to me. Still, I enjoyed how I was able to take the isolated incident of Reid’s bees and broaden it to explore the environmental benefits of beekeeping in the state. I published a follow-up to this initial article after the HOA ended up forcing Reid to remove her bees. I’m still in contact with Reid as she fights to expand protections for beekeepers across the state.