The production Leaving Iowa was the first thing I ever reported on. Leaving Iowa was the fall play my sophomore year of high school. I was never a part of the theater community in school and no one on staff was in theater that year, so finding interesting stories and angles to write about was challenging.

Brooklyn Page is a blind student at Mead High School. I reported on her story and how being blind has affected her high school career and her athletic abilities as a track athlete. The hardest part about this profile was getting the interview. Since Brooklyn was blind she had a different schedule than other students. She would get to school late and leave early. It took about a week to find a time that worked with her schedule to sit down and do an interview.

When I was a reporter my sophomore year, the staff was split into three different sections. Student life, Academics, and Sports. I was in Student Life. Student Life does different feature pages that go off grid and aren’t the normal coverage you see in a yearbook. My last spread of the year I was reporting on jewelry. Jewelry was different than the other spreads I had because we had no where to start looking for content. To find most storyies on the page we went to instagram and put different polls on our yearbook instagram for the students in our school to answer.

The Religion spread has to be the hardest topic I have ever reported on. It is already a difficult topic, that some people feel uncomfortable about approaching. So finding people who were willing to talk was the first challenge. I went to the counselors and had to ask around to find people who were willing to talk about religion and also find the different religions in our school. We wanted everyone to be represented on the page, so finding as many different religions as we could was very important to us. I also had a partner on this spread who was uncomfortable with the topic, which led her to do none of her work. My advisor, Makena , was also in Europe during this production cycle, which made things even more difficult especially when I couldn’t communicate with her the issues we were having while reporting on this spread.