The Bourne and Sandwich High School classes of 2009 graduated last weekend. Yours truly was not only responsible for covering both commencements, but also providing most of the written content for the supplements that the Enterprise produced to commemorate the events. They both look excellent, by the way. I got a chance to peep copies on Wednesday and the colors on the photo pages just popped off the page, especially in Sandwich.
Graduation is a challenging time of year for reporters. It’s not the assignments themselves that stress the reporting muscles, though. In fact, as most high school administrations provide electronic copies of all the speakers’ addresses, there’s really no need to frantically scribble notes like you would at, say, a planning board meeting. The challenge is to resist the temptation to sleepwalk through the writing process. It would be easy to do, in order to preserve your mental energy for more challenging pieces, but that wouldn’t be a service to the folks in the community for whom receiving a diploma is, in fact, a big deal.
What I try to accomplish with any graduation story is to show the readers that, at the very least, I was paying attention to what the speakers were talking about during their addresses. If there’s a common theme that arises throughout the speeches, I’ll try to weave them together and, hopefully, present the event as a cohesive narrative.
The graduation story presents an important lesson to weary reporters who probably write between 500 and 600 stories a year. It’s that no matter how inconsequential a piece may seem to you, there’s at least one reader in your community for whom it’s the most important thing they will read all year. I don’t know if it’s possible to write a truly transcendent story about a high school graduation, but I think that it’s important to write ones that are at least attentive enough to show the audience that you realize that reporting, especially for a weekly newspaper, is about serving the community, not yourself.
The views and opinions in the Enterprise blogs are those of the author and are not neccessarily shared by Falmouth Publishing.
