Catching up from Thanksgiving "break"

Week 14! This week was a bunch of catch up from Thanksgiving break and wrap up of final projects for my internship at PublicSource.

Over the holiday week, I finished the story with another local intern on antisemitism and Islamophobia in Pittsburgh amid the Israel-Hamas war, conducting final interviews and documenting what was needed for the fact-checking process. It was very interesting to be doing work while traveling for break, but thank goodness I had a solid hotspot connection for once. It was also good practice in updating information as the deadline got closer, as more information was coming out from sources up until the publication date.

On Tuesday of this week, I finished some edits for the story with a freelancer on biases in family court and the use of parental alienation, doing some final source outreach and putting together the fact-checking information. I also fact-checked a story on some Chatham faculty working together to unionize amid their ongoing deficit battle.

Thursday was a busy day. I started the day with meeting with my editor and the freelancer I have been working with. We went over the Allegheny County Court documents website, making sure we knew what to look for when verifying our anonymous sources' background information on their cases. I then did some fact-checking for a source I talked to. I also watched back a conference from the day prior on Pittsburgh declaring November Family Court Awareness month, aiming to address some of the issues we touch on in our story. I added some of the quotes from it to finally wrap up the story. I then also staged a community storytelling piece.

Here is the story I did with Pittsburgh Media Partnership intern Betul Tuncer:

Amid antisemitism and Islamophobia, faith communities and students try to tamp down tension

A pro-Palestinian poster hangs outside Carnegie Mellon University's campus. Posters were one of several topics fellow local intern and I touched on in our story published.