While a lot of people are winding down, I will probably have the most difficult week of reporting in the semester in the upcoming week. Like college students, state legislators wait until the last possible moment to get anything done, and our finals week happens to coincide with their last week of the General Assembly. So I will be spending a lot of time in Jefferson City this upcoming week as everything winds to a close, often staying in the Capitol until late at night. This semester has probably been the most difficult for me since I've been at school, between juggling about 15-20 hours a week reporting, 15 hours a week at a job that pays me, and a full workload of five classes. I enjoyed our Wednesday course a lot, though I started to get dicey toward the end of the semester. Reporting in Jeff City was pretty enjoyable, aside from a 2 week stretch in which I didn't get nearly as much accomplished as I should have.
As for the Shells project, I'm working on an end-of-General-Assembly environmental piece that should go along with a lot of the other end-of-General-Assembly things I'll be doing the next week. Hopefully, when the project does go up, that will be able to replace my billtracker.
Was the shells project worthwhile- Like many others have said, I think making the shells project into its own course might be the best course of action from this point forward. Recruiting a group of web developers, reporters and editors and having them work together would be an interesting experiment and one that might be preferable to paying a company like Bright Tree and leaving the project in their hands. I think anyone in the Advanced Reporting Class is going to have enough on their table to begin with, and adding a huge undertaking like this, in addition to our regular beat, has high burn-out potential. After all, we're getting 3 credit hours.
What did I learn- I learned a pretty good deal about the energy process in the General Assembly in doing my profiles and bill tracker. One of the most interesting things I learned was that while most people have a positive reaction to Green issues, there are a lot of things that go into alternative energy, and it's not as savory as a lot of people think.
Would I do it again- I can't honestly say. I will probably not look into reporting as a career path and tend to have a lot more passion for the political process than journalism. I can say that reporting on things other than politics is pretty excruciating for me and I've never had a lot of passion for it. I've gained a lot of good experience in Jeff City in the two semesters I was down there, so I can't say for certain I wouldn't do it again this semester. But it was a lot to put on our table for a career that I'm now pretty certain I'm not going to go into.
What would I change- I would have liked to work on a topic that I was more knowledgable about, and I'd have liked for there to be a clear message on how much time we should spend on the shells in comparison with our regular beats. If I had a choice between doing something for my beat and doing something for the shells, I'd likely pick my beat just about every time. It's nothing against the shells project, I just have more passion for and a lot more invested in my original beat.
What would I keep- The class discussions were very good and I feel as if we had a great group of reporters. Tom is a great teacher and someone I have a lot of respect for, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to get in the Columbia newsroom a bit more this year. The shells projects was a great idea, but one that's difficult to accomplish with a small amount of reporters with virtually no free time.
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