Personal Consumption

To say I consumed an above-average amount of news as a high school student would be an understatement.

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I like to constantly keep myself up to date on the latest happenings both in my community and around the country. My family is heavily interested in local news as I am, so we love to float around news stories we hear from sources like The Downers Grove Patch or MySuburbanLife in our family group chat. For in-depth COVID or political news from the Chicagoland area and across the state, I also turn to sources like WGN and Capitol News.

 

I was also frequently in contact with the editors-in-chief from the Blueprint, the student newspaper at our sister school, Downers Grove South. I loved checking in on their website and seeing all of the wonderful pieces they create for inspiration as well as news consumption. 

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For the realm of national news, I began tailoring Apple News notifications on my phone and computer around my junior year to include some of the most trustworthy news sources in my mind, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC. I also get notifications from the NPR and AP apps on my phone, as I see those two as among the most neutral and sophisticated sources. All and all, I get around 50 notifications every day from a variety of news sources which is extremely helpful in this ever-polarizing political climate.

 

Especially in the age of social media, it's so important to differentiate between legitimate sources and "clickbait" or pure conspiracy. My sophomore year, I wrote an in-depth article alongside two co-editors about these dangers, which included a discussion of echo chambers and navigating news on social media. The article had the goal of informing students what not to do to fall into those "traps," and we collected some great interviews from students who have had experience with heavily biased social media news sources as well as individuals who base their understanding of current events solely on those sources.

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Using My Voice

Throughout my journalistic career but mostly my senior year, I had to rethink the goal of my writing. 

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Our publication's audience included students, but also faculty, parents, and members of the community. We had a responsibility to present the truth in a manner that was easily digestible but did not conform to our audience's or the administration's preferences. Our opinion section saw some bumps in the road my senior year, but I truly believe we always did the right thing.

 

In mid-November 2020, I wrote an opinion piece about how Trump losing re-election was a win for protecting the truth. I made clear in my writing that this was not an attack on any ideology or party and strictly a commentary on Trump's misinformation record. Many conservatives from our school expressed their anger on social media and much of their argument concerned shallow comments about our "liberal agenda" and things of that nature. We acknowledged the comments, discussing in class over the next week about bias and how best to move forward.

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Bias Lesson

What we did in class that week, which can be seen in the images below, was probably one of the most important lessons I've ever learned at school. 

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Our adviser gave us an excerpt from Brooke Gladstone's 2011 graphic novel "The Influencing Machine" to learn more about different types of bias and seek out those biases in our writing and publication as a whole. 

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Our adviser also had us take a quiz later that week with a partner to define each type of bias mentioned in the book, point out the ones we have as a staff and brainstorm ideas for how best to dismantle those biases.

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Personally, I would say I definitely have a bad news and visual bias. While it is usually an implicit tendency, I am absolutely more attracted to stories with big, menacing pictures of negative events compared to those without such features. No one person is completely unbiased, but my goal for the future is to work to get as close to that as I can to better execute my job as a journalist.