As I am writing this now it is hard to believe that once I turn in this assignment I am done with college. I am feeling more confident going into the second project now that we have got the groove of things and done one before. I was ready to tackle the project head-on and see what we can do.
Andrew and I decided for the interview he would be conducting it because our interviewee was more comfortable with him but we compiled a list of questions together to target our main areas of focus. We also needed to steer in a different direction of mustang news’s previous story of the Bread Bike as well. I think we did a good job of targeting the areas we thought would be important to highlight for the angle of our story.
Once the interview was done, I initially was struggling with where to start or what to focus on because the interview had so much good content. I also think my partner, journalism senior, Andrew Suarez, also was having a hard time with condensing the interview as well. “It was great stuff but it has been super hard on the video side also to condense a 35 min conversation into a minute,” said Suarez.
I think after the 5th time of going through the interview and talking it through with Kim I found out where I could streamline my main focus. Writing stories is like a puzzle for me, I start by writing anything that comes to mind no matter if it is in the right order or not and putting everything I think is important on the paper. From there, I mix and match the pieces of where they would fit best or if some should be thrown out.
I think throughout all the pandemic this was a really interesting and needed story to write because from the majority of what I have seen it is all very dreary and negative and this was not the case for our story because they have been doing well and were not caused to shut down like most restaurants.
It was also really nice to see his love for baking and his business shine through in the interview. “My whole goal is I want to make people happy, feed them make them feel good,” said Denicola. Learning more about the industry and the process he has and how he did not have to shut down was really interesting to learn about as well as he made a good point about how the grocery store is probably one of the scariest places to go now because people from all over are going to that one store.
Overall I think we did a good job of shining a light on Sam’s passion for his business and what it means to him and at the same time learning more about something we didn’t know much about before.