Dinorah Prevost | USFSP America is headed toward a mixed-race majority, says Morrison.
By DINORAH PREVOST USFSP Student Reporter
In recent years, the U.S. Census Bureau has poked the beehive of race in the United States with statistics.
It poked first in 2008 and more recently in 2014, predicting that by 2044 white Americans will make up less than 50 percent of the population.
Yes, whites will be outnumbered, but not in the way we think, said journalist and magazine editor Donald Morrison.
“At the rate we’re going, this country is not going to be a minority white country,” he said. “We’re going to be a majority country of mixed-race people. It’s the fastest growing single demographic.”
The former TIME magazine editor was on a panel titled “When whites are in the minority, how will they be treated?” at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs. Professor emerita Linda Whiteford, professor and historian Ray Arsenault and former Zambian refugee Felicien Kakure joined Morrison.
“Race and ethnicity will, by force, cease to become a major factor in our lives when our kids are all married to each other,” Morrison said.
Whiteford, a cultural anthropologist who taught at USF Tampa, said race is arbitrary anyway. It’s rooted in social conditioning, not in biology.
“‘White’ is a category that is made up,” she said. “It’s not a biological construct. It’s a made-up construct that’s been used over years to protect the rights of those in power who happen to be … white.”
Race, like class, is a useful divider for the majority, according to Whiteford.
“Different countries use it in different ways. In the United States, we’ve always been interested in race because it underpins much of our social fabric, our economic fabric and our history,” she said. “In Great Britain, they don’t talk about race. It’s not on their census. What are they interested in…traditionally as a category? Class.”
Who is “white,” Morrison said, is ultimately subjective. He pointed to Hispanics as an example of the “weakening of ethnic identification” as immigrant groups assimilate.
As generations of a family grow further away from the original immigrant, there’s a decline in Hispanics identifying as Hispanic, he said.
“What I think distracts us from this trend is that on the census, if you’re considered a minority or any mixed ethnic group,…you also self-identify and Hispanics increasingly self-identify as white.”
Morrison said the fear that people from an immigrant background will one day outnumber “natives” is not a new concern in the U.S.
“Ever since the first big waves of immigration in the mid- and late 19th century began to hit this country, we have heard concern from the non-immigrants that this was not a good thing…that they were somehow going to change the character of the culture of our country.”
And even if in the future race is “no longer an important distinguishing characteristic,” Morrison said, Americans will still divide themselves.
“We will invent others (issues). This is a trait that is innate in humans. We like to have a sense of belonging. We’re still going to look for smaller groups to adhere to,” he said.
Jonah Hinebaugh | USFSP The U.S. now resembles “some of the more unsavory parts of the world,” says Arsenault (left) with Canadian diplomat Susan Harper.
By JONAH HINEBAUGH USFSP Student Reporter
The phrase “American exceptionalism” was used for the first time in 1930 – by Joseph Stalin.
In the decades that followed, those words became a point of pride in a country that relished being a moral leader in the world.
But over the last two years, the phrase has turned into a double entendre for America’s “not-so-pretty” nationalism, said Ray Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin professor of Southern history at USF St. Petersburg.
Now the U.S. is “much more like some of the more unsavory parts of the world in terms of breaking with democratic traditions and embracing authoritarianism,” Arsenault said during a panel discussion at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs.
In earlier years, he said, “we would have called (those developments) un-American, and so, for better or for worse, I think Canada almost has become the new United States and they’re our last best hope.”
The panel discussion, titled “Let’s talk Canadian exceptionalism,” revolved around an opinion piece in the New York Times praising Canada as “the leader the word needs.”
Susan Harper, a panelist and Canadian diplomat, said her country earned that praise through programs like universal health care, open borders and, according to her, the 10th largest economy in the world and one of the safest as well.
“When you’re sitting beside the largest (economy in the world), sometimes you feel small, but relative to others, we’re in a pretty healthy position,” she said. “But like other economies, we have issues around the distribution of that wealth. We need to deal with those.”
The opinion piece cited the Syrian refugee crisis, comparing Canada’s acceptance of 40,000 refugees to the 12,000 accepted by the U.S.
Arsenault said the cultural gap between the U.S. and Canada has widened tremendously over the past couple of years.
The debate over refugees was only the beginning.
Since Donald Trump became president there have been threats to declare a state of emergency to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico – a step he took Feb. 15 – and his Muslim travel ban in early 2017.
“Pride goeth before a fall, and if you embrace this notion of the exceptional, I think it carries a very heavy burden, because inevitably some people are going to take this as a kind of chauvinistic superiority,” Arsenault said.
“I think we’ve seen this in American history, and I hope that maybe Canada will have a lot more sense … (to) use that label and not turn it into something ugly.”
In many cases, he said, that is “what we have done in the United States.”
Emily Wunderlich | USFSP Why does TV news offer opinion-based programming? Because it’s cheap, says Dowell (left).
By EMILY WUNDERLICH USFSP Student Reporter
He watched the news industry evolve from essential facts to infotainment and opinion.
Born in 1943, during the heyday of newspapers and radio news, William Dowell remembers how important papers were to his family during World War II.
“It was not clear that we were going to win the war, and so people read newspapers because their survival depended on it,” said Dowell, a former foreign correspondent for TIME magazine and two television networks.
The 1950s brought the advent of television news, which by the 1960s had supplanted newspapers as the No. 1 source of news for most Americans. And by 2000 the three cable news networks, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, were challenging the supremacy – and the standards – of NBC, CBS and ABC.
Dowell blamed the shift from straight news to fluff, entertainment and opinion on the economic model of journalism, and a panel at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs seemed to agree.
“So why did we go to opinion?” Dowell asked. “The reason is: It’s cheap. It’s a lot easier to pay somebody to say what they think about something … than it is to pay for reporting, which takes a really long time.”
Marguerite Moritz is professor emerita and UNESCO Chair in International Journalism Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She said the commercialization of the news is what contributes most to its detriment.
“In the early days of television news, news was not expected or demanded to make a profit. News was there for another reason; it was to establish the credibility, the prestige, the authority of the network,” she said.
Now, Mortiz said, television reporters and news executives no longer ask how to cover stories, but rather which ones are going to bring in the most viewers.
Her solution? Make the news commercial-free.
“Let (networks) make money from their other partners,” she said.
However, Douglas Herbert, a commentator for the France 24 international news channel, suggested that there’s a place for opinion in a healthy news organization as long as it’s clearly labeled.
“If you really want to solve a problem, I don’t think it’s about getting opinion out of the news,” he said. “But I also believe that it’s equally necessary and vital to make sure that readers are aware of the divide.”
Dowell commended that idea, emphasizing the importance of information in a democratic society.
“Most of us who went into journalism didn’t go into it because we wanted to push forward a political point of view,” he said. “We simply wanted to report and make the world a better place.”
Brianna Rodriguez | USFSP “There has been tremendous change,” says Roux.
By BRIANNA RODRIGUEZ USFSP Student Reporter
When Emmanuel Roux opened his first restaurant in St. Petersburg in 1993, the city’s dining choices were limited and boring.
“Dining in St. Petersburg when I came was filling a physiological need,” said Roux.
And now?
“I think there has been a tremendous change,” said Roux, who owns Gateau O Chocolat – best known for its flour-free cakes – and runs an urban agricultural education farm called 15th Street Agrihood.
Roux and two other speakers on a panel at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs agreed that the resurgent city has become a mecca for foodies of all ages.
It’s not just traditional American fare that restaurants are offering, the panelists said. Diners now have a wide array of choices because American cuisine has become international cuisine, they said.
Look no further than St. Petersburg’s Beach Drive.
When she moved to the city in 1992, there were no restaurants there, said Janet Keeler, a journalism instructor at USF St. Petersburg and coordinator of its food writing and photography certificate program.
Now several high-end restaurants line the trendy street, she said.
Across the bay in Tampa, the story is the same.
Many active duty and retired military personnel who live near MacDill Air Force Base grew fond of Middle Eastern fare while serving abroad, said Laura Riley, the food critic at the Tampa Bay Times.
Now a number of restaurants in south Tampa have Middle Eastern entrees on their menus, she said.
Hal Friedman, 76, one of the dozens of people who attended the panel discussion, said afterward that he favors small, independent restaurants over chain places.
At small businesses, he said, he can relate to the owners, noting that the husband is often the chef while the wife runs the floor.
Dylan Hart | USFSP Europe is ‘falling disastrously behind” the Paris climate agreement, says Herbert.
By DYLAN HART USFSP Student Journalist
Douglas Herbert is not a smoker, but says he inhales the equivalent of 183 cigarettes a year.
“The reason I smoke 183 cigarettes a year is because I live in Paris, where diesel fuel pollutes the air,” Herbert said. “If you visit London for a four-day weekend, it’s almost three cigarettes.”
Herbert, a journalist and foreign affairs commentator for the international news channel France 24, joined professor Don Chambers and marine scientist Ellen Prager at the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs for a panel on climate change.
Herbert told the packed ballroom that while he might not know science on the same level as Chambers or Prager, he does know the politics behind climate change, especially in Europe. And he has his own ideas on how to combat climate change.
“There’s a very high awareness of this issue in Europe,” he said. “But there are varying degrees of ambition. All of Europe is seen as right now falling disastrously behind the Paris climate commitment, and it’s not on track to follow that commitment.”
French voters elected President Emmanuel Macron in 2017. Macron, while a centrist, ran as an environmentalist, but he has received some backlash from the public for enacting environmental policies.
Most notably, Macron introduced a gas tax in 2018 that sparked a massive protest of over 280,000 French demonstrators wearing yellow vests.
While optimistic about an environmental solution, Herbert argued that cutting down car usage in France – much less the United States – is unrealistic.
“The reality in France, here, and in any other industrialized country is that people rely on their cars to go to work,” Herbert said. “Macron didn’t take into account that vast swaths of France, especially the most economically disadvantaged parts of France, rely on their cars.”
Herbert also said that France is “in bed with the nuclear industry.”
Over 75 percent of France’s power comes from nuclear energy, and Herbert believes that France won’t close the plants anytime soon, unlike neighboring Germany, which is working on eliminating nuclear by 2022.
“On the surface, if you’ve never heard of Fukushima or Chernobyl or anything else, nuclear is great,” he said. “But (people) in France don’t want to live anywhere near a power plant – they think ‘not in my backyard.’
“The easiest thing for me to say is that I’m against nuclear because of the potential damage, but there are a lot of misunderstandings about nuclear energy.”
Herbert noted that he has visited several nuclear power plants and that the safety of the plants has significantly improved.
“‘Activist Doug’ would really like to say it’s awful and to get rid of it, but my rational self thinks it’s become safer and safer and, utilized the right way, it’s a very good energy – it’s very cheap and efficient.”
Chambers, a professor of physical oceanography at USF, argued that nuclear energy “needs to be a part of the discussion,” contending that only the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine was “really catastrophic” and that the 1979 Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania was blown out of proportion.
He also pointed out that while Germany is phasing out nuclear, it will still rely on French nuclear power and pollutive coal to fuel the country.
But the average person can’t solve transportation issues or pick what kind of energy fuels their country. So what can an individual do to combat climate change?
There are a lot of ways, according to the three panelists. But Herbert brought some often unaddressed ideas to the table: avoid “buying new,” track your carbon footprint and eat locally sourced food.
“Know where your food is produced,” he said. “Be in touch with nature.”
When asked to give 30-second conclusions, the three panelists were unanimous: “Voting in the next election” is the biggest thing an individual can do to fight climate change.
Courtesy Josh Solomon “Sometimes, when the sun goes down, so does the productivity,” says Solomon, shown clowning around in the newsroom.
By DYLAN HART USFSP Student Reporter
Josh Solomon likes the jolt of adrenaline.
He played basketball as a center and power forward in high school and remains a fan of the New York Knicks. He received his pilot’s license in his last week of high school but hasn’t flown in years. He rides a motorcycle in his free time.
And as the Tampa Bay Times’ Pasco County crime reporter, Solomon loved the thrill of pushing a hard news story out the door.
“I still like writing the crazy crime story on deadline,” said Solomon, 27. “It’s fun. It’s a rush. It’s a personal challenge.”
But above all, Solomon wants to do the right thing.
He sports a “Westfield, N.J.,” tattoo on his left forearm, in honor of the town where he grew up. He picked up a journalism class in high school and found his niche writing and reporting, especially since he loved to ask questions.
“I was always kind of a pain in the butt,” he said.
While Solomon’s interests may draw him to a high-octane style of reporting, his childhood drew him to civic skepticism. His father was a member of the board of education, and local government “was dinner table talk.”
Listening to his father, he said, “I always felt like my peers were getting screwed.”
Taking his experience from high school, he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He interned at CBS News in the summer of 2013 and came to the Times in 2014 after graduating from Medill.
Solomon started at the Pasco office in Wesley Chapel, reporting on crime and breaking news.
“I loved the job in Pasco,” he said. “I was driving a lot, I was outside all day and visiting crime scenes.”
But while Solomon enjoyed the excitement of covering crime and visiting courts, he wanted to do something bigger and more impactful, something that would draw on his childhood skepticism of government.
He twice applied for the job covering City Hall in St. Petersburg and got it in November.
When Solomon isn’t covering city government, he focuses on covering the courts in a similar fashion – as a place to examine systemic legal issues.
A court story is among Solomon’s proudest works – a September 2018 piece about a Florida doctor who was sued for malpractice and for years made a principled stand against the suit over anything else.
Solomon said that the first two or three drafts of that story were “failed attempts at an accountability story,” a style that he praises colleague Mark Puente for executing well. But the story naturally developed into a strong narrative.
“What I liked is that different people saw different things in the story,” Solomon said. “Some people saw (the doctor) as a hero; others saw him as a crazy person. It’s about perspective.”
Although crime and courts were his first assignments and government is his new focus, Solomon considers himself a “jack of all trades.”
Press passes for local Trump, Clinton and Sanders rallies are pinned to his cubicle wall, alongside a press pass for the launch of the SpaceX-8 rocket. One of his weirdest stories involved a topless woman running through the Sanders rally.
Some of his most rewarding work, however, has been covering three hurricanes that hit Florida — Hermine in 2016, Irma in 2017 and Michael in 2018.
“Even though it’s telling the story of someone’s tragedy, it’s so much fun,” Solomon said. “It’s about telling the story of what happens after the storm; it’s an opportunity to help people.”
Although Solomon has been covering City Hall for only two months, he has big aspirations for his role in the city.
“I’m trying to write issues stories,” he said. “I’m not creating the narrative, but I’m trying to push the story along. I want to find more high-level stories and work them out.”
Solomon has a cordial relationship with City Council members. He waves to them as they pass his desk at City Hall, and he makes small talk with them about what he’s writing. But he knows that journalism and government are inherently at odds.
“Just because I write a tough story doesn’t mean I can’t say hi in the hallway,” Solomon said. “Some people might view it as a cat-and-mouse game, but it’s not. I want the same things they want – a better St. Petersburg.”
While Solomon knows there are “tough stories” to be written and issues to uncover, he knows that his relationship with the government is one that can make positive change.
After all, his Times profile says that he is in journalism because he believes “the truth can touch hearts and change the world.”
Courtesy Megan Reeves “I came to love K through 12 education reporting,” says Reeves.
By AMY DIAZ USFSP Student Reporter
Tacked onto the wall of her cubicle in the newsroom is a neon pink slip that angry teachers created for an unpopular Hernando County school superintendent.
On her desk is a Slinky she was given on her first day on the job in a whimsically named “fun pod” of cubicles where Slinky is the mascot.
Her desktop background is a picture of her cat, Fran, named after the animal rescue center where she found Fran and now volunteers once a month.
Her mom sometimes calls her Nancy Drew, but her name is Megan Reeves and she’s a journalist at the Tampa Bay Times.
Reeves, 26, graduated from the University of Florida in 2015. She started as an art major but after having to pour concrete and dress up as a clown, she turned to Plan B: journalism.
Her studies focused on photojournalism, and she took pictures for her college paper, The Independent Florida Alligator. She wrote her first story when she went on an assignment and the reporter didn’t show up. It ran on the front page.
Now 1-A stories are nothing new for Reeves, but she says it never stops being cool.
By the third day of her internship at the Times in 2016 she had a front-page story that posed a question about Gasparilla, Tampa’s annual boozy pirate fest: What happens to all the beads?
She spoke to environmental professionals and disclosed the unintended consequences of throwing beads from boat to boat while intoxicated. A lot of them end up in the water.
After the story ran on the front page, Reeves received a big envelope in inter-office mail with a letter from the managing editor and editor commending her on the story and welcoming her to the paper.
Her six-month internship turned into a year-long internship, but when it ended, she was told that there was no money in a shrinking newsroom budget to hire her full time.
“So I thought, OK, this is the end of the road, but I got to work there for a while so I just need to accept that,” Reeves said. “I started working at a restaurant, and I just freelanced for the Times until I could find something else.”
A few months later came a call offering her a job covering education in Hernando County for the Times. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it was a full-time job with benefits so she felt like she couldn’t say no.
It turned out well. She ended up reporting to Karen Peterson, whom she calls the best editor she’s ever worked with. She also fell in love with her beat and eventually earned a promotion to the St. Petersburg office.
“I came to love K through 12 education reporting, which I never thought that I would because it seemed kind of boring to me,” she said. “I wanted to cover city government or cops – you know, something sexy.”
The beat ended up being more interesting than she anticipated. Lori Romano, the Hernando school superintendent, became the focus of multiple stories. The School Board said Romano’s performance was below average, many people took issue with her, and in one day she fired 47 teachers from the most struggling school in the district.
“In a meeting, she looked across the table at me and said, ‘Your work is crap and I refuse to read it,’” Reeves said. “I said, ‘OK, that’s fine.’ She was fired the next day.”
Romano, who now works in the Pasco County school system, probably has her face on a dartboard, Reeves quipped.
Over time Reeves has built up her confidence and toughened her hide, although she said it’s challenging to be a young woman in the field.
“It’s hard because you want to be like that nice person that everyone thinks is nice,” Reeves said.
“But being tough doesn’t make you a bad person. It doesn’t make you not you. It just means that you know how to hold your shit.”
Reeves has found public records to be an empowering tool. By getting as much information as she can from as many places as she can, she’s able to stand up to people like Romano and – more recently – Dallas Jackson, a Pinellas middle school principal who was removed by the superintendent after months of complaints from administrators, teachers and parents at the school.
Reeves said she has been threatened with lawsuits three times in her three years at the paper. One was filed and dropped, and the other two were never filed.
“The longer I do this, the less I care about telling happy stories,” Reeves said. “I think they’re important, but my time is limited. If I am going to work on something, I probably want it to make someone mad because that means that you’re trying to make change.”
When Reeves was an intern at her first job at the Lake City Reporter, she got a call from the sheriff’s office. An infant had died in a hot car, authorities said, after her father forgot she was in the back seat.
“I drove to the address and there was a girl a couple years younger than me standing in the front yard, just screaming, hyperventilating and grabbing her face,” Reeves said.
“It was just a terrifying experience. I’ve had to report on stories like that four different times, and every time I do I’m crying. I always call my mom.”
Another time, she wrote a story about a shelter in Pasco County for people with special needs during Hurricane Michael. She spoke to a man who had devoted his life to caring for his mother and watched the roof of their house fly off during the storm.
“Before I left, he just took my hand and held on to it, and I’ll remember that the rest of my life,” she said.
When Hurricane Irma hit, Reeves rode a school bus that was evacuating people from their homes in Hernando County to school shelters.
She met an 80-year-old woman who asked her to move a picture of her late husband off a counter and into a drawer to keep it from getting wet.
Reeves exchanged phone numbers with the woman in case she needed to ask follow-up questions. When the story was published, the woman called to thank her and praise the story.
“We started talking on the phone regularly and she actually became a good friend of mine,” Reeves said. “We ended up going to a play together because she told me when we were on the bus on the way to the shelter that she loved plays.”
Her job can be both emotionally taxing and fulfilling, Reeves said, but her team in the newsroom is always there to support her.
She was in Jacksonville visiting her parents last August when news broke of a mass shooting at a nearby video game tournament. She got to the scene and sent the details and quotes she gathered to reporters and an editor in St. Petersburg who assembled the story.
On a recent Sunday evening in the Times office in St. Petersburg, during the breaks between news briefs and public record requests, Reeves, another reporter and an editor cracked jokes about Gasparilla, gushed over instant-pot recipes and discussed the future of journalism in the digital age.
Her work is hard but rewarding, and sometimes it’s fun. Once a week the office has donuts.
Courtesy Megan Reeves “I would rather have two jobs than no job,” says Reeves.
By JAMES BENNETT III USFSP Student Reporter
Megan Reeves covers two education beats: the Pinellas County school system and the University of South Florida.
So in a typical day, she might attend a USF St. Petersburg Campus Board meeting, comb through public records on a former middle school principal, then do some interviews for the university beat.
And that’s all before lunch.
While juggling the two educational behemoths, she can’t help but wonder if her time would be better spent on just one of them.
She prefers the K-12 beat, where she feels her work has the potential to make a bigger difference. But there is still important work to be done on the USF beat, and the cash-strapped, staff-thin Tampa Bay Times does not have reporters to spare.
“I would rather have two jobs than no job,” said Reeves, 26.
At first, neither beat seemed all that glamorous. She was used to cop ride-alongs, burning buildings and interviewing the families of murderers. Still, it was an opportunity to work at the place that calls itself “Florida’s Best Newspaper.”
Reeves’ interest grew once she started reporting the K-12 beat.
She learned how much corruption can be hidden in the education systems, how underfunded some schools are, and how important it is to make sure the next generation is coming out of school prepared
“Now, I look around the newsroom and I’m like there’s nothing that I want to do more than this,” she said.
Reeves vividly recalls her first day as a Times intern.
Driving from her home in Hillsborough County, she arrived in St. Petersburg two hours early on the chilly morning of Jan. 18, 2016.
Assistant metro editor Roy LeBlanc, the paper’s intern coordinator, welcomed her with an explanation of newsroom policies, a lecture on plagiarism and a warning: If she was ever pulled over for speeding, it wouldn’t be smart to tell the officer that she was racing to meet deadline.
Afterward, sitting at her desk, she racked her brain for story ideas. She wanted her first piece at the Times to be a home run.
“I was so afraid to fail, or for them to think, ‘Oh, we hired this intern, why did we do this? We took a chance on her.’”
Then she had a light-bulb moment.
Gasparilla was right around the corner. After watching video after video of tipsy pirates tossing beads into the water, Reeves asked a nearby reporter if he could suggest some environmentalists she could ask about the effect of all the beads that end up in the bay.
The resulting article landed her on 1-A on her third day on the job. The editor congratulated her with a handwritten letter that she treasures.
The following three years have been filled with countless long days, reluctant sources and a bit of relocating.
“You don’t do this job because it’s 40 hours or because you make a lot of money,” Reeves said. “You do this job because it’s a beautiful, wonderful thing and a gift.”
Courtesy McKenna Oxenden Oxenden enjoys horsing around with Sassy.
By BRIANNA RODRIGUEZ USFSP Student Reporter
McKenna Oxenden wakes up at 6 every morning to travel from St. Petersburg to Plant City to feed 25 horses before starting her job as a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times.
One of those horses is GG, a 15-year-old mare Oxenden has owned for six years. The name fits her well, Oxenden says, because she is so sassy.
Oxenden, 22, began horseback riding at age 6 and started competing four years later.
“It’s a big part of who I am and what I want to accomplish,” said Oxenden, who hopes to compete in the Olympics one day. “It keeps me sane. I’m not a very happy person if I don’t get to ride.”
She said that a lot of life lessons in riding translate to journalism.
“There is a lot of uncertainty, just like (in) journalism,” Oxenden said. Each day brings a new challenge: She doesn’t know how her horse will behave or what she’ll be covering at the newspaper.
Courtesy McKenna Oxenden There are hurdles in riding and in journalism, Oxenden says.
Oxenden was born in Maryland. She fell in love with journalism her senior year in high school, when she dropped a pre-calculus class and switched to journalism. She went on to study journalism at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
Oxenden began at the Times as a summer intern. She worked on web design last fall and started the new year as a one-year intern covering breaking news and general assignment in the St. Petersburg office.
She is also the producer and editor for the Times’ entertainment and culture podcast, “The Life of the Party,” which is released every Friday.
As a reporter, Oxenden said, one of her most memorable stories was about a father who police say tried to choke his son with a baby wipe. The mother of the 6-month-old boy was grateful for the chance to tell her story, Oxenden said.
Oxenden said she enjoys making a difference and having the opportunity to write stories like that.
“You’re writing history and holding people accountable,” she said.
Courtesy Langston Taylor His data skills help him get stories and keep his job, Taylor says
By DINORAH PREVOST USFSP Student Reporter
There wasn’t a wow or eureka moment for Langston Taylor with journalism. His father was a reporter so it was always around him.
It remained a constant through his days as editor of his high school newspaper in Silver Spring, Maryland, and in three staff positions at the Daily Tar Heel at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Those years led him to the Tampa Bay Times, where Taylor, 23, is now a general assignment and data reporter. To him, reporting is “a rewarding challenge.”
“You become exposed to all parts of the city you live in, you talk to families and workers and experts you never would have otherwise. I feel like I’d miss out on a lot of life without that driving factor,” Taylor said.
After covering daily assignments, he turns to working with numbers. He coded in college and regularly uses data to tell deeper stories.
Pushed to one side of his desk are printouts of Florida maps, dotted and shaded red in certain spots with words scribbled in.
From his cubicle on a slow holiday, Taylor shared some tips for young reporters.
Apply for internships and jobs with intent.
These days, Taylor’s girlfriend, Stephanie Lamm, 23, works at the Dallas Morning News. But before Dallas, Lamm applied to a number of newspapers across the South. After interviewing at some papers, she came to two realizations: either she didn’t like the boss or the paper’s work environment.
Ultimately she didn’t want to work there.
Despite the pressure of landing a job in this shaky journalism market, Taylor said, recent graduates shouldn’t apply for positions without doing some research.
Figuring out whether they really want to work for a certain outlet is key. And the best way to learn about the work culture is talking to people with experience there.
Negotiate for a permanent job if possible.
Just after graduating from college, Taylor went to work at his second internship for the Times in May 2017. It was a six-month position, so before it ended Taylor wanted to ensure his stay at the paper.
He applied to three other media outlets, including the Charlotte Observer, where he had interned for a summer. The Observer made him an offer. With that in hand, Taylor persuaded the Times to cut short his internship and give him a permanent job.
Move on from positions when you feel you need to.
When Taylor started at the Times, he worked in the Tampa office as a general assignment reporter, covering government, activism and crime.
Covering crime, he spoke to many mourning relatives.
When his father died, making those phone calls and knocking on those doors became more difficult.
Taylor said he knew his limit. He left the Tampa office and moved to the St. Petersburg office in October 2017.
Be flexible and lend a hand on projects around the newsroom.
Taylor’s specialty is working with data and producing graphics to represent it in an easy-to-understand format for readers.
He lends himself to small-scale data reporting when he is done with general assignment stories for the day, while more in-depth data stories are left to the Times enterprise team. He said that willingness to help can establish yourself as a handy person worth keeping in the newsroom for the long run.
As an example, he mentioned “Danger on two wheels,” his story with Times reporter Tony Marrero about bicycle accident hot spots in Tampa Bay.
Using data, they confirmed that people commuting to work on busy roads like Fowler Avenue in Tampa are involved in more accidents than leisure riders who stick to bicycle trails.
Taylor is now compiling data for a larger story on the impact of Florida’s recently adopted Amendment 4, which restores voting rights to felons who aren’t convicted murderers or sex offenders as soon as they complete their sentences.
He’s pinpointing communities across the state with high concentrations of ex-felons who are now eligible to register to vote.
Use data and public records to your advantage (and to make your job easier).
In a story about the drawn-out recount during last year’s midterm elections, Taylor used public records to reach voters in Broward County. While there is no Times office on the east coast, he said, that doesn’t stop him from writing a story using the voices of Broward voters.
Taylor made a request for state voter records via the Florida Division of Elections website. He used the contact information provided by a number of Broward County voters and mass emailed over 3,000 of them. He included 40 responses in his story “Bill Nelson’s Broward County problem.”
Don’t feel obligated to follow the traditional (that is, intern to reporter to editor) path, because reporters are getting laid off midway through that path.
And don’t feel bad for taking the easy route if the opportunity comes up. Taylor said he thinks he’s been lucky to do as well as he has in the industry, especially because he gets to work on larger, weeks-long data projects.
“I think being a young reporter now means having an advantage in understanding the internet, and there’s a chance to become very visible and impactful in your lane,” he said. “That probably wasn’t available a decade ago.”
