Grade Pitch

Based on my performance this semester, I believe I deserve a C for my final grade in advanced reporting.
In my list of goals from the beginning of the semester, I stated that improving my writing in longer, feature-style stories was my main goal for the semester. With my stories on the Mid-Missouri Comics Collective, professional comic book writers in Kansas City and other arts stories, I believe I have stretched and improved my skills. Based on the field I want to enter in journalism — entertainment journalism, particularly at the publication of my former internship Wizard Entertainment — these clips have been extremely helpful in job applications and, after sending them to Wizard to update my resume, I was contacted for a job interview and later offered a job. In that sense, I consider my work at the Missourian a success because it showed Wizard that I had learned from my time there and gave me a chance to demonstrate that I could apply those skills elsewhere.
I believe my class participation during the course of the semester was also a strength for me in this course. I enjoyed the chance to express my opinons and views in a blog and later have some of them reach not only my classmates but faculty members across the Journalism School as well. In all our talks about how we want to improve the Missourian in our community and make it a source for discussion, I ended up using my blog to cause discussion within our journalism community. My e-mail to Tom — which later became a blog post — about the need for a forum on the Missourian’s web site was a topic of discussion in class and in e-mail form among editors and faculty. My post about whether we were really listening to our readers led to a class-long discussion. I think in writing these posts and managing my blog in a thoughtful and provocative way, as well as participating in the discussions in class, I demonstrated the theme of discussion outlined in the syllabus and prompted my classmates to do the same.
However, I am aware that the quantity of my output fell significantly short. I spent a lot of time on my first three stories on the comic book community and did not immediately pick up the pace. That said, once being made acutely aware that this amount of work was not going to cut it, I spent nearly every day after that in the newsroom and pursuing stories with gusto.
I think my improvement since my last stint reporting at the Missourian was substantial, and the goal of honing my skills at writing longer stories was achieved. I have tried my best to recover from low output; I’ve written five stories since Thanksgiving — with more to come — and have been in near-daily contact with my editor. I believe I have earned a C.


(See the below for my final non-grade pitch post)