By Darby Kendall
Mentor: LaToya Dennis
Austin’s first public food forest will take root in the city’s east side. The third district is one of the poorest in the city having more than 30-percent of residents living below the poverty line. “We need food. We’re poor,” says one resident who hopes to take advantage of the food forest. The idea is to give the public a free source of fruits and vegetables.
Behind the Story: My Next Generation Radio experience
I first heard about Next Generation Radio during one of my reporting classes at UT Austin, and right away, I knew I would apply. Radio is the journalistic medium that has always interested me the most, and I jumped at the chance to learn more about it.
Thanks to my parents, I’ve spent all 20 years of my life listening to NPR (although I probably only registered it for the last 13), so getting the chance to see how public radio operates has been fantastic. I’ve learned although radio may be a little hectic and a require lot of hard work, it is also greatly rewarding. The feeling of satisfaction that comes with finishing a story is hard to put into words.
Although I struggled at the beginning to find a subject for my story, I ended up deciding onAustin’s first public food forest. The story ended up being more emotional and compelling than I imagined it to be, thanks to my interviewees. The fact that my mentor, LaToya Dennis, shadowed and helped me out with every stage of my story also made things go much more smoothly. This project had the potential to be rough on me, but thanks to her and all the help I got from the other (actual) adults at Next Generation, it all worked out.
These past five days, I’ve experienced finding a story, losing it, finding another story, tracking down interview subjects, standing in 100 degree weather for over three hours to collect audio, and then turning the product of all that into a viable story. This project has given me awesome radio experience,and now I’m ready to continue on in my journalistic journey and learn some more