Semester was one of memorable reporting

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America’s first black president was inaugurated. The university lost five of its students. The MSU men’s basketball team vied for the NCAA Championship in Detroit.

You don’t need me to tell you it was a memorable semester at MSU. But it was especially memorable for us at The State News. Our role is to record history, share the significance with our readers and inform public opinion on issues the community might not otherwise know. But that responsibility multiplied as the news of the semester played out.

No pressure, right?

Each day, you read the published newspaper or the Web site. In our newsroom, it was even more personal. We saw the stories, the people, the issues and events that captivated us and forced our academic and social priorities to the back burner indefinitely.

This semester was a challenge for a multitude of reasons which vary depending on who you talk to at the paper. The challenges came in ways many of us student-journalists never anticipated.

For staff members, the semester started off with a bang with the inauguration of President Barack Obama. We were fortunate to send four staff members to Washington, D.C., to record the historic national moment for our readers.

Before the group left, we planned out how we expected it to go. But even the best laid plans go awry. The group dealt with deadline pressures and a crowd of hundreds of thousands as their technology failed at the worst times.

In this age of digital media, they reverted back to traditional means of reporting and got the story the old-fashioned way.

Several of us thought the inauguration would be the most important coverage of the semester. But then came the crime alert one January morning, saying a student had died in Spartan Village.

It was difficult enough to report on one student death, but as the semester went on a total of five students died for various reasons. The challenge with each of these was to share the person’s life while answering the community’s questions. There’s a natural curiosity that we all have when it comes to death, and many readers turned to us for answers that we tried our best to come up with.

For cops and courts reporter Kyle Feldscher, talking with each of these students’ families was one of the most difficult challenges he’d ever faced, but he told me it was rewarding to help the families share their students’ stories with the MSU community.

“It’s important to tell people so they know who died, not just that someone died,” he said. They weren’t just students who died, they were people. They were classmates, neighbors, friends and loved ones. Their deaths were a loss to our community.

In March and early April, MSU went into madness with basketball frenzy.

The frenzy amplified as the Spartans came out as Big Ten champions and then advanced in the NCAA Tournament, knocking off team after team and beating the odds. (So what if they lost in the final game — we’re still proud of them!)

For each game, men’s basketball reporters ate, slept and breathed the team’s progress, even if their academics suffered for it.

Reporting on the Spartans basketball team always had been a dream for reporter Alex Altman. Despite the physical and mental drain the season’s coverage demanded of him, the sacrifices were well worth it, he said.

“Being at The State News, I always felt that I was part of something bigger, something special,” he said. “But that kind of pressure just feeds it.”

I think that’s what we all love about producing The State News — we are a part of something bigger than ourselves.

During semesters like this, it’s a responsibility that becomes more important even as the world look bleak at times.

Our staff learned lessons that will last a lifetime, regardless of what career path they pursue. But more importantly, we hope that our coverage, somehow, has helped you learn something too that maybe improves your daily life at MSU.

We hope you, our readers, will turn to us for semesters to come to find the news they need most.

Kristen M. Daum is the State News editor in chief. Reach her at daumkris@msu.edu.

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