Top Five Stories
1
Addressing reality of violence
The school shooting epidemic is a loaded, complex topic, and this story is the quintessential example of localizing a national topic for a high school audience. Our community had a few school shooting threats at the same time we had our first hard lockdown drill of the year. Beginning with a news peg of the hard lockdown drill, I then delved into the history of school shootings, balanced student and teacher opinion on school safety, and addressed school safety policies.
(published in The Prospector on October 25, 2024)
2
Disruptive empathy
It's hard to put into words how much this story changed me. There are so many ways a high school publication can cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict wrong, and although I looked at the mistakes other publications made, the fear that I could cause hurt was always in the back of my head.
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I interviewed seven sources for this story, but only two made it on the page. Some source's beliefs were beyond the scope of my coverage, some dropped out due to safety concerns, and others I felt I couldn't balance the experiences of. After speaking with five Israeli and Palestinian students, I realized that with such an emotionally charged issue like war, it's not the role of high school media to compare and contrast student experiences. With the emotional overstimulation of social media, it's easy to become detached from the effects of war until you are face-to-face with those affected by it.
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Instead, I used the news peg of the ceasefire and one of my source's recent experiences to explore how students can healthily discuss historical trauma. I introduced a high school audience to "disruptive empathy," a framework that challenges students to critically engage with other perspectives — even those that could be considered the opposition — and acknowledge the historical wounds that shape them.
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(published in The Prospector on February 7, 2025)
3
Incoming year of dragon; Inclusivity
When I heard that our newspaper would be coming out the day before the 2024 Lunar New Year, I knew I had to do a story for it. I decided to focus not only on what celebrations occur on Lunar New Year but also on how representation plays into the knowledge of the holiday. This story has a special place in my heart because it was the first story I wrote in the newspaper where the senior members put their hands back and allowed me to show what I could do. I included two students' perspectives, a teacher and an administrator, to illustrate the experience of being Asian in the United States and the benefits of representation. This story tackles everything from keeping traditions alive to how Asian staff members made their way through the education field, all with the central theme of holiday representation.
(published in The Prospector on February 9, 2024)
4
This story is the "sequel" to the Lunar New Year story. While that story emphasizes the benefits of representation, this story uncovers what happens when there isn't representation. The story primarily focuses on Ross Harano, a third-generation Japanese American born in an internment camp. By including Harano and a fourth-generation Japanese American student, I was able to illustrate the complex struggle of Asian American identity caused by a lack of representation: the fact that despite their families being in the United States for over a century, they are still treated like foreigners.
It was tough to put this story together because I had to balance the historical trauma Harano and my student source experienced while also acknowledging the perspectives of a U.S. history teacher trying to both teach an AP curriculum and educate on issues less spoken about in the past.
(published in The Prospector on May 24, 2024)
Reflecting on Asian American education
5
From alumnus to Paris Olympian
Erin Reese had a wild story of how she made the Olympics for hammer throw, and chronicling it was definitely a challenge. I sat through around two hours of interviews with Reese and her coach to fully understand the complexities of the hammer throw event and how she eventually made the Olympics. I'm proud of how I was able to boil down a five year journey into one story. However, if I were to redo it I would split it up into either two stories or multiple sections. While some of my favorite journalistic pieces are long chronicles, from a design point, I feel like chronicles in a newspaper and not a features magazine — or book — should be broken up for easier readability. It would be as simple as splitting the story into her 2021 and 2024 Olympic trials.
(published in The Prospector on September 23, 2024)
Honorable Mention
Prospect vs. Buffalo Grove
KnightTV Live on Marquee Network
Marquee Sports Network is a regional sports network, available nationally that is the exclusive broadcaster of Chicago Cubs games. Once the Cubs season was over, they offered air time to a few high schools to fill in the time when games were shown on Fridays. While not a "story" in the traditional sense, this broadcast deserves to be in the top five because it was the first broadcast where the group of us five seniors finally put everything together, from the announcing to the producing, to the camera work. On my side, as the color commentator, I reached out to the opposing team's coach to get the story of the team's season, so we could provide equal coverage to both teams while on air. All the prep work that went into this made our widest reaching broadcast the most memorable one