Brainstorming what I wanted to cover for my enterprise story was pretty simple. A topic that I’m very passionate about immediately came to mind, as it seems to always do when I need to write or speak about something I’m interested in.
Skeleton, the sport I have competed in for the past five years and have had the best, most unique experiences in my life. Along the way, I met some great people, athletes, teammates and friends. Even though I no longer compete in skeleton, this is a community full of friendly faces that are always happy to see you succeed and to catch up with you.
So, for my story I decided to choose one of my friends, Akwasi Frimpong. I found his story inspirational because I think he was seen as the underdog in most competitions and he ended up going to the Olympics and even after, is continuing to make a name for himself and leave his mark on the skeleton community.
When thinking about sources for my story, obviously I thought about Akwasi, but I had to think about who else is associated with him and his story, so that’s where Zach Lund and Lauri Bausch came in. These are the best people to contact because I’m talking to the founder of the program, the head performance director/coach and Akwasi’s coach during the Olympics.
After interviews, I made sense of all the information I gathered by putting it into categories based on the questions asked and the answers given, also in order of the story line I was going for. Once I did that, it all came together how I wanted my story to be read.
The writing process came in bursts. Once I gathered and organized my information, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with it or how I wanted to articulate it to the reader. So I set it aside and came back to it. Once inspiration hit, that’s when I’d write. I’d write until it became a struggle to think of something and then I’d take a break and do it all again. After it was roughly written. I went back over it to finalize the product. And I learned that’s the way I like to write as opposed to forcing it.
Overall, I think writing this story was a good experience. It not only taught me the process of writing a news story and how to conduct interviews and form a story, but it also allowed me to connect back with the skeleton community that I’ve missed a lot.
U NewsWriting 