Tomorrow is the last day of my Carnegie-Knight News21 fellowship. It’s been a journey—from the five-month seminar to the 10-week summer program.
During the fellowship, I traveled back home to Maryland to report on constitutional sheriffs’ responses to gun laws in the region. I led workshops to make the newsroom more familiar with digital tools. And I completed weekend design overhauls and 15-hour coding sprees.
This summer I designed and coded the News21 Gun Wars project website from scratch. With a fellow front-end developer, I created wireframes, story designs and a special section which I will update here once the site is published on August 16. I have gained extensive coding and design skills from building a site that will house over a dozen long-form articles, over 30 videos, many more photos and several large datasets and graphics.
I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work with editors Len Downie, Jacqueline Petchel, Peter Bhatia, Brandon Quester and Retha Hill. They offered feedback on my writing, designs and interactive work. They pushed me to write clearer stories, lead innovation in the newsroom and produce an extensive multimedia website. Reporting and designing under their watch has been a challenging and worthwhile experience.
Check back in two weeks for the project link! You’ll find incredible stories, videos, photos, interactives and datasets on guns in America then.