An episode for your weekend: Alice Scott, JEA Student Journalist of the Year

She's now a freshman at the University of North Carolina

Alice Scott is this year’s Journalism Education Association Student Journalist of the Year. Alice was co-editor of The Shield, the student newspaper at McCallum High School in Austin, Texas. It was not her first national award. She also won Student Broadcaster of the Year in 2022 from the National Scholastic Press Association.

Alice talked about how her interests evolved from theatre to journalism, shared the story that most influenced her desire to be a journalist, explained how her approach to journalism is centered around listening, gave examples of the work she did, and shared her journalism aspirations.

An excerpt of our conversation is below. I hope it gets you to listen to the interview.

The overarching theme to your approach to everything related to journalism seems to be ‘listen to people.’  What do you think of that?

I would definitely agree.

I think, for me, the biggest part about journalism is the people behind it, the people you're interviewing.  And it's not about topics or covering events or big-ticket  news items or national headlines. All of that's important, but the most important part of it is the people behind that. And you don't find those people without listening.

The articles I write, they're all very people driven and I really like to say like you don't know what the angle of your story is going to be until you've done your interviews because you might learn something completely different that changes the course of what your story is about. Maybe it was going to be about three people, but you talk to one person and their story is so unique that you have to tell their story and the article shifts.

And that's okay.

I don't think you should go into interviews with this idea of ‘These are the questions I'm going to ask. This is the story I'm going to write.’ Because at that point, you're just asking for quotes, but what you really should be asking for is a story, and you do that by listening.

And listening to people, I think, also applies with how you relate to your staff, from what I could tell.

Definitely. I've gotten to be both a writer and an editor. You do see both sides of that and it's listening to people in when you're doing the interviews, but also hearing what your staff needs and how you can help them because I don't think you'll have a well-oiled machine of a publication if you don’t listen to your staff.

What's your key to getting a good quote?

It really goes back to what we said is my journalism philosophy and that's listening to people. And it sounds simple, but I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think as people, a lot of the times, we listen with the intent to respond. We do take in what people are telling us, but we're ready to respond, come back with whatever it is that we want to say. 

But the key to getting a good quote is listening with the intent to understand. And so, yes, do come into your interview prepared with a list of questions and do your research ahead of time, so you know what you're talking about.

But also be prepared to roll that question sheet out the window if this person starts talking to you about something more important or more interesting, or something that you feel is where the story needs to go and be ready to listen to that and understand what they're saying and go along with them and ask those follow-up questions.

I think that in addition to helping you kind of figure out where the story is going to go, I think it really helps build trust with the person that you're talking to because if they see that you’re not just a journalist with your list of questions and who's taking notes. That's a little bit of a scary dynamic. But if you show that you're a person who's just listening to them, you're just having a conversation with them, and you're paying attention to what they're saying, to the point that you can change course. That shows that you care about what they're saying and that you care about their story.

If they see that, then they can trust you and will give you more information and those more emotional, deeper and more personal quotes. 

I think it's really all about being open and showing that you care about this person and their story so that they can trust you. And then, yeah, just listening. 

What's the hardest part for you about being a journalist? 

I think the hardest part is probably that your work is on display for everyone and everyone's a critic, and that's sometimes that's on you. And sometimes that's on them.  As journalists, it's so important to always get the facts right, but also we're human and we make mistakes.

If you make those mistakes, people will tell you, people will remind you if someone's name is spelled wrong in the issue, they'll come up to you and they'll say, you spelled my name wrong.  They won't say, look, you spelled all these other names right. They're going to say, you spelled my name wrong.

And they're right. You did spell their name wrong and you need to take ownership of that, but it is hard to feel like you do all of this work and you put so much of yourself into this work to just hear the negative comments.  You have to understand you are a human, and all humans make mistakes, and the mistakes that these other people are making are just less visible. So you do have to hold yourself accountable for those mistakes, especially when it's something that you're doing, especially big mistakes.

But give yourself grace. Do remember that you're a human and remember that we can run a correction and you’ll do it better next time Most of the time, when you spell someone's name wrong or you make a certain mistake, you're not going to make that mistake again, because you, you have been reminded of it and you have this memory connected to it.

What’s the most memorable reader feeback you’ve gotten?

The most memorable reader feedback I've gotten actually came off came from a personal column that I wrote at a summer workshop before my sophomore year.

And that class was specifically about personal column writing and where that falls into journalism.  Because it's very, very different from normal journalistic writing, like news writing.

I was taking that class from my grandpa's house because my mom and I had flown out to take care of him because he was very sick. When we got the assignment to write a personal column about a defining moment in our life, I was like, I feel like I'm living my defining moment. And so I wrote this column about what it was like to help take care of my aging and sick grandpa, who was at

the end of his life. And we kind of knew that this was the end of his life, but he also was still here and what that experience was like. So that was a tough thing for me to write about just because it's a very personal topic.

We ended up publishing it on The Shield (school newspaper), but publishing on the Shield was very vulnerable because I knew people who I knew and people in my classes would have read it.

At the end of the summer and beginning of the school year, I had a role in the school musical. We went through rehearsal, regular day, and I went backstage to get my stuff. And this girl, Ana, came up to me and she was like, ‘Hey, I just wanted to tell you. I read that article that you wrote about your grandpa and it was so moving. I went through something really similar with my grandpa and it just kind of showed me that I wasn't alone. And then a few weeks later, I got a DM on Instagram from someone who had been in one of my classes last year.

And they also were like, ‘I just wanted to tell you, I really appreciated the article about your grandpa’. And it kind of gave me pause because I usually don't get that much feedback on articles in general, let alone that much positive feedback 

I think I did get so much feedback because that specific article is something that really like struck a chord with people. Love and loss are things that we all deal with in our life. And it made me realize that journalism is about telling other people's stories, but there are these rare occasions where you tell your own story and that is meaningful to people. I think that was a really cool moment.

And it also made me feel a little bit less alone in what I was going through. There's all these people around me who are also experiencing this. So that was a really cool kind of full circle moment for me as a journalist.

Please subscribe to this newsletter - and e-mail me and let me know what kind of guests you’d like to hear on our podcast - journalismsalute@gmail.com.