News Literacy
Tim Royers was an AP and regular World History teacher who taught me my sophomore year. In my junior year, he announced he would be running for Legislature in 2020. Although his campaign had to be disassociated with his teaching career, I wanted to cover this story. This task seemed to have many loopholes, however. As mentioned before, Royers running for Legislature had to be separated from his teaching career. To my surprise, we were able to cover this story after getting the idea checked. Before we could even start this story, we were given guidelines for what we could and could not cover. We were told we could not endorse his campaign in any way and that if any other faculty member wanted to run for Legislature we would need to cover them as well. I was able to go to his rally and get footage and interviews. Although this story was very meticulous to make, it turned out great and I believe we kept the bias out of the story.
For this story and for all stories, I always fact check and make sure my sources, whether it be online or in-person, are reliable. As a journalist, it is so important to deliver the facts and the truth. As mentioned above, I had Royers as a teacher my sophomore year. He was a phenomenal teacher. That being said, it was tricky to remove all bias out of the story done about him. Of course, I wanted to hype up his campaign but I could not. That’s what being a journalist is all about. Viewers and readers want a story, not my opinion and I had to keep that in mind when working on this project.