Two days in a row of writing on deadline makes Jack a sharp writer.
Translated: There’s truly no rest for the wicked it seems, as yesterday was the second day I wound up writing a pretty long story regarding at least somewhat breaking news at the last minute for the paper.
On Sunday it was my update on the Canyon Fire 2, while yesterday I pulled together an update on the Halloween visit of Milo Yiannopoulos scheduled at CSUF.
To make a long story short with this one, the Governance Committee of the student government here at Fullerton, ASI, passed a resolution denouncing the speaker and instead showing support for the Unity Block Party put on by more left groups promoting diversity that’s going to be running at the same time as his speech. The College Republicans club sent out a press release responding to that vote, obviously upset.
I had honestly expected this update to be a relatively short and straight forward one. I wrote a very similar article regarding the ASI resolution passing process back when the Republicans were looking to get a resolution barring Eric Canin from campus, though this time the angle would be slightly different considering the Yiannopoulos resolution made it past the writing and Governance Committee vote stages. Between that explanation of the overall process and a few comments on why this matters to both sides, it seemed like everything would write itself.
Then I get a hell of a lot of back-and-forth.
I interviewed the vice chair of the ASI Board of Directors, who also happened to be one of the sponsors (the writer, essentially) of the Yiannopoulos resolution. Talked to him about the process, why he jumped on this particular piece of legislation and about how the Republicans felt about the whole thing.
Then I interviewed both the Public Relations and Event Coordinator, as well as the president of the CSUF College Republicans club. More or less talked to both of them about why they felt impassioned enough by this resolution to speak out about it despite the symbolic nature and still relatively early stage of development.
Between those interviews, the official resolution document and the official press release, I had a lot of things to sort through that played off of each other quite well. Most of the issues that were brought up by one group was addressed by the other and vice versa, so I had a lot of interesting discussions within the story.
Of course, it wound up being like 900 words because of how I had to balance those emotional discussions and the explanation of the process and where we are in it… But hey, I think it’s a pretty engaging piece. And I certainly can’t complain about pulling something substantial and interesting out of a story that I figured would be small.
Everything about the story culminates in the fact that the full ASI Board of Directors will vote on the resolution on Oct. 24, at which point it either becomes an official stance by the student government on campus (symbolic though it may be) or it gets shot down, possibly to come back later under another name or not.
Obviously, expect me to probably be covering that when it happens, even though I’m trying not to burn myself out on Milo too much before he actually shows up in two weeks.
Yikes. That’s coming up fast.
But that’s beside the point. If you want to check out the story in its entirety, you can see it here. For my full archive of work for the Daily Titan, you can go over to the page on the right!
Work in Progress 