Kristen Seto's Media Participation Project

Kristen Seto's Media Participation Project

For my media participation project, I initially wanted to write for the Diamondback, but then I came across Stories Beneath the Shell, an online publication for the University of Maryland. This online publication is designed to shed light on the accomplishments of UMD students that people would normally never know about if it weren’t for Stories Beneath the Shell.  When I found this publication I immediately jumped at the opportunity to write for it because although the big headline news and stories that everyone should know about are important, the small events are often important as well. 

I wrote a story about a student named Anne who had recently escaped an abusive relationship and how she was coping with the aftermath of the relationship. Meeting with this student and hearing her story inspired me to write a piece that would hopefully impact anyone who reads it. Upon writing this story, my editor thought it would be beneficial if I spoke with the staff members at the Office of Sexual Misconduct and Relationship Violence in order to get their opinions on this student’s journey to recovery. I decided it would be an interesting idea to speak with the staff member that is currently helping Anne and get her opinion on how Anne is doing. The only problem was, the staff member asked to keep her name out of the story for confidentiality reasons even though the quotes I intended to use did not mention anything about how she has helped Anne personally. 

This didn’t sit well with my editors, which is quite understandable since the story would be much more credible if the staff member’s name was mentioned. When I contacted the staff member again, she asked that her quotes be withdrawn completely from the story and that I would have to find someone else’s quotes to use. This put me in an entirely different situation with the deadline for the story approaching quickly while I still had no quotes to use for this story. I contacted every other staff member by email and asked them to read the story and contact me with any comments they might have. I was lucky to find one staff member, Josh Bronson, who responded almost immediately and gave me a much better insight on what exactly the Office of Sexual Misconduct and Relationship Violence does which was important to add to the story. 

Overall, I enjoyed writing for this publication; the editors understood that this story had to be handled with great sensitivity and were extremely patient with it; especially when the editor learned about my setback with the first staff member. What I learned from this experience is that there will be times where it won’t be easy to find exactly what you’re looking for in terms of a story, or quotes to use in the story. I believe that this experience, although not exactly easy, was worth doing and learning about because it gave me an idea of what it would be like to be a print journalist. 

As a naturally indecisive person, I’m still not entirely sure if journalism is the right path for me to choose, but I believe that I would still be taking a step in the right direction if I continue to work towards being accepted into the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.