ILLINOIS STUDENT NEWSROOM

At the beginning of this semester, I set a goal for myself that I wanted to report as much as possible on the Latinx community. As a Latina member of the community, I wanted to use my position and the platform that JOUR 400 and IPM gives me to highlight stories about my own community. With the exception of two of my stories, I am proud to say that I was able to report on various stories that relate to the Latinx community. I learned a lot about how to best represent my community, and how to take my own experiences and translate them into vision for my work. A lot times, journalists are taught that they should remain objective from their work. While I agree on this to a certain extent, I think my work this semester shows what can happen when journalists from marginalized communities bring their experience to the table. For example, my own quincenara may not be a story, but it did guide my questions for the story I did on the Spurlock’s quincenara exhibit. In the future, I want to continue using my platform to report on underserved and under-recognized communities like my own. In the future, I would like to work on the multi-media elements of my stories. This year I really struggled with being able to make a webstory for many of my stories. I think it’s because I have a distinction in my brain between print and audio, and it’s hard for me to a find a mix of the two. Along with that, I want to work on my photography skills. The web story that I did for the Two Spirits Panel included a photo that I took myself, and I was really proud of the usage of that photo. It felt really good to be able to say that I did the audio, writing, and photography that went into my piece. I also think that the visual aspect of my stories is the next step in having practiced all of the multimedia elements of a story. In the future, I would also like to work on my voicing. During the practice we did for our features pieces, I really felt like I was able to master my voicing. Sometimes, I think I get too self-conscious of my voice, and I speak like I think a broadcaster should sound. However, during my features piece, I felt I was able to find a really great balance between sounding professional and personable, and I want to work on continuing that in the future. Finally, in the future I would also like to work on doing more pieces that involve translating. My Spanish skills were a really amazing tool that I got to utilize during several pieces I worked on this semester, specifically the one I did with Mateo Sebastian on translating. It was really fun to get to use that aspect of my culture and my background to influence my reporting. It was also really hard sometimes to sound as fluid and voice my thoughts as clearly as I do in English. Working on flexing my Spanish muscle while also getting to reach even more unheard voices is something I really treasure being able to do, and would like to work on doing even more in the future.