Behind the Story: Cal Poly Students Who Stay in SLO for Thanksgiving

We all have that one out-of-state friend. Whether he/she is from Hawaii, Colorado, or Georgia. YOU get to drive a few hours away and bam you’re sitting across the dinner table from your Aunt Lucy who’s had two drinks too many already. As much as you hate them, you love your family because the cook of the night always makes the yams just the way you like it–with way too many mini-marshmallows.

A Common Theme

During our time researching questions and discovering answers to the question:

“What the heck do Cal Poly students do when they stay in SLO for Thanksgiving?” 

(for those who aren’t locals), we found that many people actually adopt what’s called a friendsgiving. Friendsgiving: The celebration of Thanksgiving dinner with your friends. Ex. “Hey guys, bring over your family leftovers to my house on the Friday after Thanksgiving to celebrate Friendsgiving!”

It was fun to interview the outliers of the holiday and analyze their attitudes about staying in SLO. Some seemed un-touched, while others were slightly, dare I say, excited. I held multiple friendsgivings myself and they really are fun.

Our Thoughts About the Process

Demitria Castanon (PR & Yours Truly):

The reporting process was very fun. I very much enjoyed being the public relations person in the project. I like to blog, and social is fun for me (and most other people my age), and it didn’t really seem like work to me to be honest. My favorite part was tagging along in the interviews. Meeting the sources is the most exciting. Thinking about challenges, I’d say the only part that was somewhat difficult to me was the first social networking checklist because sources don’t know (nor should get the feel) that we are on a deadline so I need our communication to be prompt. A.k.a. not waiting days to see if a certain time works or not. I understand everyone has plans,  it just makes it difficult when people are unsure about setting interviews.

Amanda Fridley (Text):

I like doing print because this topic had a lot of people willing to come forward and talk about their experiences during the holiday I had fun getting to know everyone and really diving into this topic. Usually I write for broadcast so it short sweet and to the point so print should be fun for me to dig deeper into my writing. Finding sources was not difficult at all for this project

Kaylee Bingham (Broadcast):

I am not super familiar with broadcast, which is what I am doing this time around. So it has been a challenge learning all of the components, from how to use the camera to actually editing and putting a video together. I am having fun with this topic though and learning another facet of journalism.

Trevor Melody (Multimedia):

MM has been rather tricky for me compared to PR and video so far. I’m not really familiar at all with ThingLink so working with it to try and make sure that it’s been working and how it should be has been rather difficult. I also am finding that I have to interview more people than I did for both PR and Video in terms of making sure that I have enough visual and audio quality for the thinglink.

Rachel Furtado (Multimedia):

I liked hearing what everyone who couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving was doing instead. People do things that I wouldn’t think to do if I couldn’t be home with family. The multimedia component was challenging at times but it was fun trying to come up with creative ways to produce content for his project!