Reporting &
Writing
My approach to reporting
During my first year as a staff writer, I had developed what I call my “perspectives approach” to story writing.
My approach evolved during the writing of a story about the twentieth anniversary of Facebook. Without interviews of Facebook executives or a hidden secret, the story was just dry history until I spotted the two perspectives that mattered: who am I writing for and who am I interviewing? For the Facebook story, it’s high school students and community members. High school students don’t use Facebook so they weren’t going to be interested until I helped them understand how the platform paved the way for their social media apps like Instagram or TikTok. I interviewed three community members: a mother who’s been using the platform since 2006, a small business owner who showed me the ins and outs of Facebook advertising and a local journalist who uses it to advertise her stories. These interviews led to a solid story about what Facebook means to our community.
To write articles that matter to my audience, I have to think about who I’m writing for and whose stories I am telling. Everyone has something to add. I'm just the connecting piece between the experts and readers.
News
2025 News Writer of the Year runner-up by the Quill and Scroll International Society
Race in the Ozarks
A look at the history of African Americans’ influence in the Springfield area
PHOTO BY: GLENNIS WOOSLEY
“The plaque was installed by the Justice Project from Alabama that is documenting all of the lynchings across the country,” Executive Director of the History Museum on The Square, Sean FitzGibbons said.
Reporter's Insight:
This story was written with the intention of sharing the history of how Springfield, Missouri's demographics have evolved over time. Nixa, the town I'm from, is a suburb of Springfield. What tends to happen in Springfield also affects Nixa.
Once I started writing this story, I realized what would benefit our community more is to clear up a misunderstanding around the 1906 lynchings in the Springfield Central Square. At the beginning of my research, I noticed that most of the news articles about the lynchings focused on either the event or stated that the lack of African Americans in Springfield was a result of the lynchings. But when I looked at the Census Bureau’s data on Springfield’s population demographics from 1870 to now, I quickly realized that the overall percentage of African Americans was already dropping before 1906 and that the majority of African Americans stayed in Springfield after the lynchings. So from there, I reached out to experts with the goal of understanding why the data wasn’t matching up with the stories online.
In the end, the important story our community needed to understand was that there is a level of ambiguity around this event and we don’t know the full answer. But what we do know is the implications that the African American community faced for decades after in terms of politics, economics and demographics. We still need to look at the nuance and how it affects our community even to this day when diversity, equality and inclusion are under attack.
Recognition: 2025 Honorable Mention DEI-Social Justice Writing, Quill and Scroll Writing, Visual, Multimedia competition
Campaigns Target Youth
Social media-based election coverage doesn’t always spread truth
Data from: www.pewresearch.org & NHS Journalism fall survey
A survey about news consumption completed by 244 NHS students compared to all Americans over how news is consumed by percentage. *no data for “Word of mouth” and “Other” for all Americans.
Reporter's Insight:
With this story, I wanted to add more to the conversation about the 2024 election in my high school. I focused the story on how campaigns have shifted in recent years to appeal to younger audiences. I decided that the main driving question that I wanted to answer would be, “What do you think makes this election different from others?”
People who’d voted in prior elections pointed to the use of social media and AI, while newer voters focused on the attitudes of politicians as what they said was “news.” But asking a couple more questions, I figured out they were talking about social media instead of news.
Overall, through the interviews, I realized the main change in elections was social media campaigns targeting younger voters, such as the students I interviewed, which was working according to those students' belief that social media was news.
Recognition: 2025 First Place News Writing, Language Arts Department competition in Southwest Missouri
Training Turf
A look at Nixa’s new indoor activity center, the Apex
PHOTO BY: GLENNIS WOOSLEY
Senior Conner Shaar and junior Jackson Lutzke fight for the soccer ball at soccer practice in the Apex. “If it’s raining, we’ll practice outside unless it’s just either pouring, thunder or lightning,” Evan Palmer, head soccer coach, said.
Reporter's Insight:
One thing I’ve always liked about Nixa is how much we put into our activities. But I especially enjoy it when Springfield news outlets pick up stories about said activities. So, when my high school started building a new activities building, Apex, it became the front and center of all our neighboring news sources, including us.
However, my story about the Apex would be published later than most of the other stories because of our publishing schedule. To keep my story relevant, I decided to cover topics about the Apex that had been overlooked by most journalists. Rather than writing about how big it was or what features it has, I decided to cover how it was affecting people. It starts with how the admin and people in power at the school are planning to build on it. This would matter to all sports teams because they’d been having scheduling issues for years. Next, I decided to highlight prominent teams that use it. For example, the Apex was built larger than most athletic facilities with the marching band in mind. So, I went to them about their experiences and, in the process, found fun anecdotes that non-band members wouldn’t likely think about.
While reporting the story, I kept joking that I was living at the Apex because of how frequently I visited. I knew that going once to get a picture wouldn’t get the story that Nixa students would care about. To combat that issue, I visited a ton to get into their environment to understand what they cared about the most.
Title IX on Trial
Title IX faces national challenges while Nixa Public Schools’ policies remain the same
PHOTO BY: LEWEN FAITH WILSON
“The basic tenets [of Title IX] are equal access for opportunities and funding,” Activities Director at Nixa High School Brandon Clark said.
Reporter's Insight:
When thinking about the educational changes in the United States that we needed to cover in the summer issue of our magazine, one of the most divided topics that was likely to have large changes was Title IX, equality for men and women in educational environments.
Over the last decade, Title IX has been going through changes as discussions around trans athletes have become more popular. But Missouri never made changes as our lawmakers signed onto a lawsuit against the Biden administration. So when Trump was elected again, we hadn't gone through any changes, and I wanted to cover the lack of change. The point of writing this story was not only to cover Missouri's part in it, but also to spread awareness about the rest of the country.
A couple of months before I wrote this story, I realized a few students in my government class thought Missouri had followed the national changes, so I wanted to clarify this misunderstanding I was hearing among Nixa students.
Sports
Fast Track
The athletic recruitment experience differs for Nixa athletes
PHOTO PROVIDED BY TINA VINCENT
Wyatt Vincent, a 2025 Nixa High School graduate and current New York Mets player, takes a swing during a baseball game.
Reporter's Insight:
At the Medill Northwestern Institute last summer, we wrote trend stories. While I’ve had experience writing trend stories because Wingspan sets itself up well for them, I all of a sudden had a burst of trend story ideas. The main one that came to mind, since all of our sports reporters had graduated the previous year, was to turn a few sports stories into trend stories.
Fast Track was my solid attempt at showing my team that sports stories can be unique. The story was initially supposed to be about the rise of student athletes signing to college early. But as I talked to more and more athletes I found out that really it just depended on the sport. So, I shifted the story to focus on how different paths work and why there isn’t one single path to collegiate athletics.
Slam Dunk
Nixa High School’s girls’ and boys’ basketball teams defied expectations
PHOTO BY: BLAKE EIDSON
Senior Bryce Foster makes a flashy pass to sophomore Adam McKnight in their varsity game against Parkview’s boys’ basketball team.
Reporter's Insight:
Initially, I had planned to only take on one article on this issue, which was the Race in the Ozarks story. But after that story was finished I noticed this story was falling behind. Knowing that there wasn’t much time before its deadline I offered to hope on even though I don’t normally write sports articles.
The point of the story was to highlight how the boys basketball team was doing much better than predicted. The problem was the girls team was going through a similar experience. So, I pushed the story to include the girls team as well. When covering sports news outlets have a habit to highlight just male teams, which is understandable since they are more popular. But Nixa’s not slacking when it comes to female athletes.
Nowadays we have equal coverage of male and female sports.
Recognition: 2025 Second Place Sports Writing, Media Showcase at Missouri Southern State University & Honorable Mention Sports Writing, Language Arts Department competition in Southwest Missouri
Feature
BookBag Wraps Up as School Starts
Summer reading program concluded its year at Clever Library, providing books, snacks, school supplies and hygiene products to families
PHOTO BY: GLENNIS WOOSLEY
BookBag founder, Sheila Michaels, helps homeschooled first-grader Cam Zeigler load books into a bag.
Reporter's Insight:
Every year my team has the same issue, we never have new stories on our website the first two weeks of school. This is problematic since so much news happens during the summer and especially, those two weeks. My senior year I decided I’d fix this, I’d write two stories, one for each week. My first article was this one.
I wanted to start the year with a feel good story but still relevant to the beginning of the school year. So, BookBag was the clear option. A program giving free school supplies and other items was definitely making an impact on Nixa students but I wanted to figure out how much of an impact. To figure this out I went to three out of the six BookBag meetings, which took place throughout July and into August.
The number of students and parents that showed up shocked me.
Building Up Nature
Nixa students plant trees and build birdhouses by the pond at NHS
PHOTO BY: GLENNIS WOOSLEY
GLADE director, Justine Lines, teaches senior Jocelyn Farrell how to put together birdhouses.
Reporter's Insight:
To make sure I catch new interesting feature stories at my high school, I follow a lot of different clubs on social media. Instead of posting about it on Instagram, this group of students, mainly science club members, hung posters around the high school.
When I spotted the posters, I reached out to one of the students and on short notice was out in nature conducting interviews by the pond at our high school watching students build bird houses. When reporting, I wanted to convey how much work and thinking went into the project as everyone was very passionate about nature conservation. While I’m not a nature person, being out there by the pond watching birds fly by as I was interviewing people, I realized I needed to humanize the project and explain the full amount of effort that went into it. To do this I went back to writing foundations and used a lot of descriptions of what steps were taken and the nature around.
Opinion
Mindful Connectivity
PHOTO BY: MIRA WEISS
Reporter's Insight:
When writing editorials, I normally pick a topic already getting covered in the magazine. Then, I put together a team of writers, not involved with the other article, and we discuss potential arguments we could make. The editor-in-chief or the managing editor will write the editorial and everyone on the editorial board will edit it.
This was my first editorial I wrote. While people have strong opinions about technology we decided that we wanted to focus on the idea of balance. Technology can be powerful as long as its usage is balanced.
Recognition: 2025 First Place Editorial/Column Writing, Media Showcase at Missouri Southern State University & Second Place Editorial Writing, Language Arts Department competition in Southwest Missouri
The Price of Education
Funding disparities in public schools undermine students’ education and widen the gap between wealthy and underfunded schools
PHOTO BY: GLENNIS WOOSLEY
“Because of the lack of property values in [Potosi], set up by the state legislature 20 years ago, our school district receives a large percentage of our expenditures, not from local revenue, but from the state,” Greg Kester, a social studies teacher at Potosi High School and the Missouri Teacher of the Year in 2024, said.
Reporter's Insight:
The summer going into the 2024-25 school year, I attended Missouri Scholars Academy, a summer program with the top rising juniors throughout the state. While I was there, I took a class called “Get Schooled!” which taught me how American education has changed over time.
When Wingspan decided to write an editorial about the dismantling of the Department of Education, I incorporated my knowledge of the Missouri education funding system. I wrote this article for the people who believe public education will survive without the Department of Education. I wanted to describe how, even if public schools survive, we are massively disadvantaging students who are already disadvantaged by getting rid of the DOE.
My other goal was to show how there will be a shift in where funding will come from, which is harmful as it hasn’t been planned out, and that it will have to look different in each school and district.