Board Meetings, Primary Elections, and Protests: Oh my!

This week, I began my second week at my internship at The Sharon Herald. First, I got to cover a Hermitage school board meeting, reviving my student government association beat writer skills once again. The meeting was fairly short, which allowed me to have a quick turnaround on the story. Check it out here!

On Tuesday, primary election day, I edited and finished my story on the school board meeting. I also helped the staff with incoming emails, faxes, and calls about the state and local election results after having a detailed staff meeting. This was a very opening experience because the atmosphere was very stressful and intense, as the final numbers were coming in, which needed to be in the next day's newspaper, being a very quick turnaround. It showed me how to remain as calm as possible in these kind of situations and how to work with others to get a large project done in a short amount of time, but done so in an efficient way. I called the Mercer County Elections Director and interviewed him for a few updates on operations, which made it into a story with a fellow reporter. Check it out here!

Wednesday I got assigned to cover a protest that was happening in Farrell for support of a student not being able to walk at graduation. I sorted through the court records because the issues was the the student was tardy so much that a case was filed in local court. I called several school officials and even the student's mother but got no response. However, I had much better response at the protest, as I got to talk to the student's mother. I went into the school as well to talk with anyone from administration, but they declined to comment. Check out the full story here! I also had to follow up with school officials about the local school board meeting and tax raise, but could not get a response.

This Thursday was a very slow day at the paper. I followed up with local school board members for updates on the tax raise, but still got no response. Because of this, I mainly spent this shift working on assignments for my summer class and this blog post. I also looked for some potential story ideas by researching any events coming up in the area. I was also given a story about a local man needing another kidney transplant, did an initial phone call interview, and hope to set up an in-person interview for sometime next week to make this a full feature story.