- Writing a bimonthly column on food - restaurants, nutrition, trends, etc - in the community
- Wrote articles weekly for the City desk; covered town and county meetings, school board developments, drought issues, police reports and social events
- Creating story ideas and then reporting on them, including how to taste chocolate, helpful Spanish phrases for ordering food and professors' opinions of barbecue
- Coded the HTML, designed site and graphics, took photos and videos
- Directed the content and organized more than 15 students at 7 universities
- Brainstormed initial concept, made proposal, designed site, attracted bloggers
- Developed web-based applications to support reporting using XML, ActionScript, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- Designed layouts and logos for presidential convention, finance and blog web pages
- Wrote in-depth features, including story on pro tennis player Tripp Phillips, methods of exercise on campus and the town's preparations for Halloween
- Surveyed competitors' publications and suggested ideas for new issues
- Conducted research using MRI software to determine information about readership
- Planning site's concept, strategy, implementation, and logic and structure of CMS system
- Programming CMS through manipulation and restructuring of WordPress PHP templates
- Designing the layout using HTML, CSS and Photoshop
- Publicizing the site and reaching out to find contributors
- Learning essential skills for reporting on industries, companies and markets
- Becoming familiar with reporting tools like SEC Filings and the Bloomberg terminal
- Produced weekly news stories on Orange County, N.C. government
- Learned headline and blurb writing for online news, effective link construction, search engine optimization, using RSS feeds and how to use online media to report breaking news
- Edited online version of Carrboro Commons, a weekly news publication covering Carrboro, N.C.
- Practicing more than 15 hours a week from August - May
- Competing on a national level against colleges across the country
- Fundraising to cover all of program's costs
| EDUCATION | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Journalism and Mass Communication B.A. expected May 2010; News-editorial sequence Minor in Computer Science; Creative Writing |
| EXPERIENCE |
Columnist/Staff Writer, The Daily Tar Heel, Chapel Hill, NC (January 2007-present)
University and community paper; daily circulation of 21,500, readership over 40,000 A web site covering food in the Chapel Hill area through in-depth reporting A blog revealing how college campuses across the country are participating in the 2008 presidential election; Received more than 13,000 page views in less than 2 months Congressional Quarterly's free web site for policy professionals, opinion leaders and political enthusiasts across the country University general interest magazine; published monthly New England leisure and travel magazine; published monthly; national circulation of 430,000 Online participatory news site for UNC driven by user-submitted content |
| RELATED COURSEWORK |
Business Reporting
News Writing Feature Writing Introduction to Multimedia Introduction to Programming Foundations of Programming Creative Nonfiction Introduction to Fiction Writing Intermediate Fiction Writing Fiction Writing: Adaptation |
| COMPUTER SKILLS | Proficient in Word, Excel, FrontPage, Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Incopy, HTML, CSS, Java, ActionScript; familiar with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL |
| HONORS | 2008 Online News Association student newsroom scholar; Dean's List for all semesters at UNC |
| REFERENCES | Available upon request |
| ATHLETICS | UNC Men's Crew
(August 2006-present)
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