It’s my great pleasure to share a bit of news originally brought to my attention by Sean Connolly. During my time working at the American Observer this past fall, Sean envisioned and nurtured a class-wide project. Within our class, we broke into different groups and explored a “night out” in D.C., covering the goings-on in the Capital’s more popular bar districts.
The fruits of our labor were transformed into a beautiful feature that became an entire issue of the Observer. Now, that project has earned its progenitor, Sean, and the rest of our class a Mark of Excellence Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Our project was awarded Second Place in the Online Feature Reporting category for our region (Region 2)!
Congratulations to Sean and the rest of my classmates and colleagues on a job honorably done. I’m honored and flattered to be in such company, and here’s to many more awards!
During this semester at the Observer, we’ve tried to bring you some tough reporting on the news. This week, however, we take a less serious look at what’s going on.
Wait, Wait, Don’t Observe Me is the Observer’s light-hearted, news quiz show. So take a listen, and test your knowledge of current (and curious) events.
Listen to it here:
Wait, Wait, Don’t Observe Me was produced and hosted by Alex Thompson, Arrien Davison, and Brianna Pellicane, with help from Sean Connolly. Guests were Justin Gibbs, Trace Dominguez, and Justin La Rocca. This episode was recorded November 16, 2009.
As the leaves changed and the crisp autumn air replaced the humidity of summer, fall festivals sprang up across parts of Virginia and Maryland. Classmates Erissa Scalera, Sean Connolly and I took the opportunity to find out what several Virginia and D.C. residents think makes for the perfect Halloween pumpkin.
Here is another webcast I co-produced for The American Observer. In this edition of The Observer’s Nest, co-host Philippa Levenberg and I spoke with journalists in various stages of their careers about the much-debated future of journalism.
Joining us were project manager and former producer for National Public Radio Doug Mitchell, and American University journalism professors David Johnson and W. Joseph Campbell. Each of the guests offers valuable insight and hindsight into past, present and future of the field in which they’ve made their careers.
Along with my co-host Philippa, classmates Joseph Liu and Andrea Posner assisted in the cast’s production, both before taping and during.
GWU Board of Trustees Chairman Russell Ramsey, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, SMPA Director Frank Sesno. Photo by Jesse Regis George Washington University
I helped classmate Andrea Posner with this article during the week I was managing editor of The American Observer. Andrea and I attended a forum featuring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
This is a webcast we did in October for The American Observer. We produced this on the day of a forum at American University discussing how, one year after his election to the Presidency, Barack Obama was addressing the concerns of the young voters who so enthusiastically supported him during his campaign.
My co-host, Andrea, and I based much of our discussion on polls that were recently done in a graduate class taught by American University professor Dotty Lynch, who was one of our guests. We also talked to Alex Knepper from the AU College Republicans. We tried to secure a guest from the College Democrats, but were unable to get a confirmed appearance from a representative of their group.
Another article I helped with this semester is this one from September about the generational differences in feelings about The Wizard of Oz, 70 years after its theatrical release.
I worked on this article with Marcus Shorter. I helped with the photography, as well as the final look of the story’s layout on the website.
Here is a link to one of the first stories I did this semester. Classmate Sean Connolly and myself put a considerable amount of research into this story. We looked into the H1N1 readiness of the major universities in Washington, D.C., and contacted most of those universities for further comment.
For the look of the article, we tried to enhance how visually stimulating the article was, given the somewhat dry (if timely) nature of the written content. We incorporated a lot of pictures, as well as subheadings within the article and information sidebars.
