(DEARBORN, MICH.) Apr. 23, 2025 –
Edited Apr. 23, 2025 at 1:18am
Journalism will always be an ever-changing machine that necessitates writers to constantly re-learn the game; it’s never for the faint of heart. Learning how to roll with the times this semester in JuMP 331 Multimedia Journalism has been nothing short of a privilege, where I learned the steps to form a quality story from figures and data, and learning to properly put data tools and fact checking to my advantage.
We started with exploring school districts:
After learning how to properly research, fact check and navigate district disclosures, I chose Wayne-Westland as my focus for the semester and wrote my first story. Scrolling through Wayne-Westland’s communication page, I found emergency established school dates to account for a lack of a renewal agreement with the teacher’s union. My report found that the district had been operating for months without an agreement.
We moved on to exploring the world of podcasts:
I dove into NPR’s “All Songs Considered,” the network’s leading authority on finding new music. Here I learned to break down an abstract of a podcast while exploring current topics and discussions.
Curation and aggregated coverage was our next topic.
Students were invited to explore a theme of executive or federal actions during the first 45 days of the Trump administration. I chose to explore Trump’s official tariff actions against other countries. I learned to use research to substantiate my story; I brought in outside sources to provide a wide background explaining the administration’s actions in his first months.
Profiling schools were the next step in our journey:
I chose a high school in Wayne-Westland Community Schools, Wayne Memorial. I dove into basic metrics explaining the school’s environment, and learned to embed a map to provide locational context.
In an introduction into visualizing data forms, we explored school testing data.
I dove into Wayne-Westland’s elementary M-Step scoring for elementary math, and learned to find trends in data to explain recent administrative decisions and educational environments. I found a trend showing poor performance across the district, and found a trail to new plans for teachers to change the way their students approach their own education.
As social media grows as a marketing and informational vessel that industries use, analyzing districts and their use of social media became important.
I analyzed Wayne-Westland’s use of social media to inform parents and students, and advertise their strengths to the community. I learned to provide a background on how organizations use the internet to their advantage, and embed social media posts into my articles.
We ended the semester with an analysis of our chosen districts amid recent developments in federal funding levels.
I did research on the future of Wayne-Westland’s assistance from the USDA on their universal free meal program, and I found congressional proposals that threaten the safety of their assistance by raising the fence for schools to qualify. I went through government resource sites, visualized data using spreadsheet tools and provided context to explain what knowledge is currently accessible.
My overall experience was an amazing privilege, and I am forever grateful for the skills that I learned in this class. I owe many thanks to my professor Nancy Hans, and my classmates that I found the privilege of confiding in through our weekly discussions. The future of the industry is beginning here with Multimedia Journalism.
-Harrison Stidolph
