Part 1:

My name is Erin McGuinness and I am from Lincroft, New Jersey, also referred to as “Camp Cupcake,” by my High School history teacher because it is quite the suburban bubble. I am a junior in college, but a second year journalism student, because it took me a year to give up my lifelong dream of being a rock star. That being said, my number one hobby is singing. I also read a lot of fiction novels, and write short (and long) fiction stories when I am not writing news articles. Other hobbies include spending time with my large, crazy Irish family, whom I am very close to.

Journalism experience includes my work as a Staff Reporter and Editor at the Arkansas Traveler, as well as work at my school newspaper in High School. I studied multimedia journalism this summer at Yale University, where I brought my piece “Students Stand With Standing Rock,” to workshop, which, coincidentally, is the best story I believe I have written to date. I was very out of my comfort zone when I traveled to North Dakota write that story, so I was very pleased with the job I did. It was the first story I had ever written for the Traveler that required no edits, and when your editors are Ashton Eley and Ginny Monk, that is an accomplishment.

Through my workshop sessions at Yale, with the help of my classmates, I developed magazine-type story idea titled “Where are the Water Protectors?” which I hope to complete soon and have published in a decent magazine. The story will detail what happened at Standing Rock, why the story disappeared in the news so quickly, and where the thousands of Water Protectors went when they were forced to leave the Indian reservation.

My future journalistic dreams include becoming a reporter, and eventually and editor, in New York where I can hopefully cover a homelessness beat. It is something I am passionate about and enjoy writing about.

I did a bit of Data Analysis in your News Reporting 1 class, and I actually enjoyed it very much. I find detailed work like that to be oddly relaxing, so I am very excited to get more accustomed to it and start using it in my stories and research.

Part 2:

In the section “Why Journalists Should Use Data,” this paragraph was especially intriguing to me: “This is why data journalism is so important. Gathering, filtering and visualizing what is happening beyond what the eye can see has a growing value. The orange juice you drink in the morning, the coffee you brew — in today’s global economy there are invisible connections between these products, other people and you. The language of this network is data: little points of information that are often not relevant in a single instance, but massively important when viewed from the right angle.”

How do I find the relevance in these simple things, like the coffee I brew in the morning? What should I be looking for that may make me stop and think; ‘Ah, I should do some data analysis on this.’ Do you have any suggestions on how to find a story in a seemingly meaningless or monotone detail of life? Do you have any particular experiences where something as simple as your morning cup of coffee, mixed with an idea for data analysis, made you produce a great story?

I ask this because I often worry about forming ideas, especially now as an editor, I always want a few ideas on hand that I know my reporters would be able to report on, in case my reporters are struggling to find their own story ideas. But, at times, I struggle to see the story in the un-obvious details of our everyday lives. This paragraph left me questioning. The section goes onto say that journalists should see data as an opportunity, which, indeed I agree. But, my the second part of my question is, how do I know when something calls for data analysis?

Have you ever written a story, and looked back on it some time later and thought ‘I wish I had analyzed some data on…..to contribute to my story?” I want to avoid this in the future.