April 10, 2018 Article Published

Boy it has been a while since I’ve gotten anything up here, hasn’t it?

I could wax on for a while about how I’ve been really busy with school and haven’t had the time to blog anything… But I’ll probably be complaining about how busy I was yesterday when working on this story so I don’t want to bog things down too much.

That said.

Yesterday I was super busy.

Monday’s have been a massive time suck for me this semester thanks to having classes blocked from 11:00 a.m. (requiring my morning to begin at 9:00 a.m. at least due to my commute) to 5:00 p.m., but yesterday added an extra commitment.

After that last class of the day I also had to cover a story from 5:30 p.m. to about 8:30 p.m. A story that was due on deadline that night, which left me also hanging out at the newsroom until 11:30 p.m. or so.

Hence why I slept in so late today and haven’t gotten to this blog post until now.

The late night event I covered started as a little bit of connective serendipity. Paolena, one of our writers on the paper from last semester and a friend I was in a few classes with before that, hit me up because an old source she had talk to pitched a story.

That student was Sara Salinas, the president of Cal State Fullerton’s Generation United Nations group. GenUN was hosting a resource fair with local school clubs and nonprofit organizations to bring attention to work on the homeless situation in Orange County in light of recent events at the Santa Ana riverbed.

The story of putting this article together was actually an interesting one. 99 percent of what I perceived the piece was going to be was written over the weekend using pre-reporting information. I didn’t want to be stuck too deep in the trap of boring, basic event coverage, so I tried to build up some background regarding the OC homeless situation.

Of course having that basic story drawn up was beneficial, but it discounted the fact that I got way more good stuff at the event itself than I had expected to.

One of the more disappointing things about how the piece turned out was that I think it got cut a little too trim in the editing process. I had a bunch of really nice conversations that didn’t wind up making it in the final version: With CSUF students interning at HIS House, with a representative of City Net, with a formerly homeless student and with the secretary of GenUN who brought everyone together.

I tried to remedy some of that with additional photos and embedded tweets in the online version of the story, and by passing some names along for potential future articles, but I still think this article could have been more substantial.

Despite that, I really like how it turned out given the wider focus of the issue adding onto the event coverage, so I’ll leave it at that and hope I at least did everything justice.

If you want to check out my story in its entirety, you can read it here. You can also see my full archive of work for the Daily Titan over on the right!

• Journalism