November 7, 2017 Article Published

Don’t know what it is exactly about this semester that has led to me posting about all these fairly important things I’ve been working on later than I should… But in this case it’s probably safe to assume my statistics exam had something to do with it.

Anyway, that’s not important. What is important is the fact that I wrote another article the other day, an article on a pretty significant topic in fact:

CSUF’s president Mildred Garcia took a new job and announced she would be leaving her current position in January.

That’s right, even though Milo Yiannopoulos’ visit was our big thing for the semester, life certainly hasn’t slowed down all that much since he came. The departure of the campus’ head official after nearly six years would certainly qualify as big news too, I’d say.

As soon as we heard about Garcia leaving to take a job as the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, we immediately hit up Strategic Communications to see if we could sit down with her and talk about it. Much to our surprise, she was available to do so despite things obviously being busy thanks to her announcement, and that afternoon I went up to the top floor of College Park to do an interview with her and Chief Communications Officer Jeffrey Cook alongside my EIC Zack, our photo editor Katie and our multimedia editor Mia.

From there the story is pretty straight forward. Went back down to the newsroom, transcribed everything and wrote an article outlining why she’s leaving, what she’s going to be doing now and how the end of the semester is going to be affected by her departure. That includes the overall search for a new president that will begin after CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White comes to campus to gauge the community (date to be determined) and the planning and implementation of a new University Strategic Plan.

Plus whatever else is being planned for CSUF’s 60th anniversary, of course.

I’m likely going to be following up on this article for some more general deep coverage on the abundance of president searches in the CSU system. Or at least that’s my current plan if I can get it while working through all of my classes, but until that comes you can check out my article here.

It even includes the multimedia piece put together by Mia, though I’ll admit It’s a little cringe-y hearing me acknowledge Garcia as she talks. Not very used to doing video interviews still, it seems. If videos aren’t really your thing, just seeing Katie’s photo of Garcia looking bittersweet about the decision is an incredibly powerful image.

You can also check out my full archive of work for the Daily Titan over on the right!

September 25, 2017 Article Published

It’s starting to feel like I’m going to build myself a “breaks apart federal documents” niche the way this semester has been going.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR – not to be confused with the Orange County Register, since I did get that question during deadline night) announced Friday that they are withdrawing two documents that contain statements about policies and guidance for handling Title IX.

The documents, a Dear Colleague Letter from 2011 about sexual violence and a follow-up Q&A regarding the same subjects from 2014, received legal criticism and were apparently imposed “without affording notice and the opportunity for public comment” according to a Dear Colleague Letter put out by the OCR.

I go more in-depth into exactly what the original documents talked about in the article, as well as some finer details like what is still considered in place as far as policy goes, but it took long enough to get something together that was simplified down for print, so I think it’s really just worth pointing right to that for anything too intricate.

The other part of this story that was important involved the California State University system. Because part of the OCR’s message talked about how they’ll be starting a process to create new guidelines with more public input, CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White’s statement in response to the Title IX changes mentioned that the school system will be a strong participant in the process.

So, of course, we reached out to CSUF to see if they specifically would be a part of that effort, or whether it was something better left to the systemwide representatives. Our answer from the university’s Chief Communications Officer was essentially the latter, with a hefty agreement to the Chancellor’s message to boot.

Honestly that just about sums up the whole thing, and it wasn’t necessarily much of an exciting development process to get there. We waited for a bit to get the CSUF response, but otherwise everything relied on information from the OCR and the CSU statements, so it was more a matter of taking a couple hours to scour out the wording and pull it all together. It felt good to pull this kind of an information-heavy story in such a quick manner, don’t get me wrong, but I’m just not proclaiming any sort of fireworks were going off as it happened.

At least I got to show off my document scrubbing skills, like I said. Plus I didn’t have to do it while sitting in Downtown Disney like I did for that DACA article earlier this month, so I certainly can’t find any reason to complain.

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

September 11, 2017 Article Published

Pulling this story together was arguably one of the more interesting reporting experiences I’ve ever had.

Over the weekend, the University of California Office of the President announced that they had filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security over the Trump administration’s decision to rescind DACA last week.

As soon as we heard about that (though we heard about it a little late, admittedly) I jumped on the story. The CSU system and the UC system are totally different entities, but together they comprise a large majority of the higher education in California, so what one does tends to affect the other. Thus, even if the CSU didn’t make the decision to file a lawsuit, it was imperative to get an idea of just what the lawsuit was and whether or not our school system would follow suit.

Pun not necessarily intended.

Of course, as it turned out, the day that we found out about the lawsuit and I began to work on the article was also the day I had pre-arranged plans to spend time with a family friend. We were all having lunch out in Anaheim at Downtown Disney as both a way for my Dad to catch up and for me to network with some journalists.

Thus, I spent all day reading through and translating the text of the UC system’s lawsuit off of my phone while wandering Downtown Disney and trying to talk with people all at the same time. It was, frankly, a mess. The fact that I was wearing a black shirt in the blazing heat didn’t help either… But it was a mess that wound up working out really well.

I’m pretty proud of how I took the lawsuit apart bit-by-bit to really elaborate out the reasons why it was being filed. I think it turned out pretty comprehensive in that respect, despite the majority of the piece just being that discussion of the lawsuit itself.

In terms of the localizing details, that was a little trickier simply for getting information together than it was for translating legal jargon. Something was wonky with our news desk email, and that made us miss the message from CSUF’s Chief Communications Officer until yesterday afternoon before we published. We also weren’t able to hear back from the larger CSU Office of the Chancellor over the weekend, which meant we were essentially running off of our University’s perspective of what was happening.

And our University’s perspective was that it would be something handled at the systemwide level by the Chancellor’s office.

Ironically enough, in the midst of me writing this blog post we did get a response from the Office of the Chancellor. I was able to update the story accordingly, so now the text available online reflects that addition.

It wasn’t much of an addition considering the Office of the Chancellor essentially mimicked what our school’s representative said, but I suppose I wouldn’t have expected much more than that. If nothing else it served as a good argument for the magic of the Internet as a means of updating things as they go along.

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

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Though the DACA-related article was the only one I wrote for our paper today, I did also want to point out that I actually took photos for a separate story running on our page.

As part of my Multimedia Journalism class I have a multimedia kit checked out for the whole semester. Though it has become a hell of a nuisance to carry that thing, my backpack and a tripod around campus whenever I have class, it turns out that having a professional camera available to me is a pretty useful thing.

When I went with our new assistant news editor to cover the Humanities and Social Sciences Inter-Club Council meeting (since SQE was presenting to them hoping to argue against Milo Yiannopoulos coming to campus), we realized we had forgotten to call a photographer to come. Luckily I had my multimedia kit so I could work on another assignment, as it let me take the pictures for that event.

Though I got some complaints about my camera shutter being too distracting (which at a public meeting did not mean much… But I still apologized), I think it wound up being good practice for my homework later and I was able to get credit in the paper for taking photos.

I really haven’t taken photos for anything beyond the Homeless Investigation last semester, so having the extra experience was kind of fun for someone so print-and-word oriented. I’m thinking I might try to take photos more often in fact, and if I do I might even try to reflect that here on the blog archives.

Guess we’ll just have to see.

If you want to check out the photo I took to represent the story, you can look over here. It is our first follow-up on the Milo Yiannopoulos stuff before getting the official confirmation of his coming by the College Republicans club president, so it’s probably worth reading for that too if you’re interested in following through.

September 6, 2017 Article Published

So technically this article does not have my byline, and I’m not looking to take credit for it by any means, but the story is important enough that I definitely feel like it’s worth sharing here.

Yesterday, the White House announced their plans to eliminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and sent everyone into a tizzy – for lack of a better term with more gravitas. My co-editor Brandon and I jumped into action right when we found out, as he had preempted the possibility of things happening with a small story the day before.

Not only did we spend most of the afternoon out and about trying to do interviews with DACA-related officials and student activists responding on campus, we also scowered through Trump’s press statement, the statements released by higher ups like CSUF President Mildred Garcia and CSU Chancellor Timothy White and we staked out the Dreamers center to try and get some raw opinions on the subject. We did wind up succeeding on that front, where we also got access to some officials from other campus clubs and organizations who were visiting to give their condolences and support.

This was also the story that contained my little adventure trying to get an interview with Pollak Library Dean Clem Guthro. I elaborated on that in my last post about the Autry event I attended, but I still can’t get over the wonderful serendipity of it all. So why not call back to it again, am I right?

Unfortunately, that break at the Autry for Boom meant I had to spend a solid 5 hours of the night outside of the newsroom. Thus, while I did stay on call to help pass along sources (such as the extra Guthro interview) and edit the story, I was not able to be involved in actually writing the story.

The decision to go wound up being hard to make, as DACA was such an important story last night that I felt like it might even be worth skipping out on the Internship-based event I’d RSVP’d for at least three weeks ago. Brandon said he could handle it however, so I decided to go anyway. Luckily the event ended early enough that I was able to swing back to Fullerton to help close out the night, so I didn’t feel as bad by the end.

That’s why I don’t have a full byline in the story, as I wasn’t actually a serious part of writing the piece. Instead I got a contributing credit for all the work I helped put into it.

However that should by no means be taken as a complaint. Brandon did a phenomenal job pulling together all of the elements we collected into a succinct, engaging story. I actually had next to nothing as far as corrections went when I looked over it from the Autry. He wholeheartedly deserves the credit he got, and I’m happy just being a part of it.

I just happen to appreciate a little self-promotion, so I figured it was worth pushing this one out on my blog for the sake of my part in writing it. On top of the massive emotional impact and great reporting, of course.

If you want to read the article in its entirety, you can see it here. Brandon really did a wonderful job and it’s definitely worth the look. Beyond that, if you want to see my full breadth of writing for the Daily Titan, you can find it over on the right!

February 23, 2017 Article Published

Lots of crazy stuff happened last night and we wound up staying until the early hours of this morning producing our last issue of the week.

It wound up being arguably one of the best issues I’ve helped put together in my opinion.

As far as my own written contribution went, my co-editor Sarah and I worked together to produce an update for the story Sarah and our assistant Brandon put together on Feb. 8 about the lecturer involved in an altercation with members of the CSUF College Republicans club.

Not only did we get an official comment from the University’s Chief Communications officer that told us what the internal investigation into the issue turned up, we also got a comment from the lecturer himself about his current status.  Through those two we found out that the investigation concluded the lecturer did strike a student, impeded on the free speech of the College Republicans club and was suspended as a result.

Pretty awesome stuff to get to throw together all at once, and I’m super proud of how the update turned out.

However, that wasn’t the only thing in this particular issue that made it such a good one.  We also have stories about a strange and interesting series of arrests that Sarah looked into, Trump’s administration addressing the transgender bathroom issue yesterday, CSU Chancellor Timothy White releasing a statement about how immigration concerns will be handled by the school system and more.  Lots of really good stuff written by a lot of great writers in one of the more memorable page layouts I’ve seen in quite some time!

All the stories are available online of course, but I’d also recommend looking at them in their official print layout over on Issuu, since it really is a really nice issue overall in my opinion.  It’s a slightly biased opinion I suppose, but this is my personal blog so take it for what it is.

If you want to see the article on the lecturer altercation update in its entirety, you can see it here.  You can also check out my whole archive of work for the Daily Titan through the link over on the right!