The public life beat covered all of the forums with the elections marked in red on his calendar.
Apart from choosing the Columbia Public School Board and the Hospital of Trustees, the city was voting for the councilmen of wards 1 and 5. For that, we reported on a wide range of forums where the candidates talked to the public about issues that they cared for. Apart from that, each of them was being “followed” by a reporter in order to make a series of profiles that we ran the week before the election.
The three forums that I had to cover are the following:
1. Environmental Issues.
I went to a Friday night forum with Soo Rin Kim, one of my colleagues in the beat. The tough part about it, aside from the fact that the deadline was savage that night, was to make sure we understood every question that was going to be mentioned. We managed to get a photocopy of the six questions that the candidates were going to face, and we did some research on all the topics to be able to cover all of them with a proper framework.
The final story we wrote had to cover all the problems, but also needed to be something readable and easily understandable for our viewers. We ended up publishing this:
2. Cocktail of issues.
On the second forum I covered, the three candidates for the First Ward talked about taxes, community policing, the controversial Aurora Organic Dairy and a bunch of other questions from the audience.
To be clear for my readers but also fair with the candidates, I decided to divide the story with different subheadings and include the answer of all the candidates in various orders.
3. Racial inequities
The last forum I covered was hosted by Race Matters, Friends: and organization in Columbia that fights for inequities. The complicated part of this story was that there issues raise were very different, so it was hard to make a coherent, unified story. Too many controversial topics, too many candidates, and too many questions. It ended up being a three-hour meeting.
In addition, it was an unusual forum, given the fact that the candidates gathered around a potluck. Tracy and Grace, the two women who presided the dinner, insisted the journalists displaced on skipping the journalism ethics of not having food at places where they serve it.
My colleagues decided not to eat anything, which is totally fine, but I think that one of the things that I try to do to make myself stand out is the human connection that I try to build with the people I’m covering. So I stood up and covered my food with delicious food cooked by one of the candidates.
I’m sure that a lot of people would totally disagree with me on this, but I believe that when they ask you more than once to take food, especially in a potluck, it’s kind of rude not to. It’s not a big deal, you’re just being like everyone else. After that, some of us offered to help cleaning up everything, and it is thanks to that kind of gestures that you get to meet amazing people and stories that you wouldn’t hear otherwise.
Cabina Cero 