52 Newsletters Later: We’re not going anywhere, but change is coming
Behind the scenes of The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
Today’s newsletter will look a bit different. It’s kind of a goodbye — and a hello.
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project published its first edition on May 28, and other than weekends, we have sent out a newsletter every day since. Fifty-two of them. One for each card in a deck, if you will. (That wasn’t planned.) But now, this newsletter project is winding down — in a way — and we wanted to invite you, our loyal readers, in on the process.
But first...
🌱 OUR ORIGIN STORY: When we first set out on this project, we received a Faculty-Student Collaborative Grant to report and publish this newsletter as our full-time jobs for 10 weeks — which ended yesterday. (We’ll get to who we are in a moment. So keep reading.) Lisa Schwartz, who manages student opportunities at CC, turned around our grant proposal, which we described as “a rare opportunity for students to both get valuable experience and serve the community,” within 24 hours.
Student publications at Colorado College don’t typically run over the summer, so we created this newsletter to fill the gap until those publications kicked back up again in August. They’re about to do that, so we’re now working on the next steps to integrate this project into those efforts.
🔎 WHAT WE’VE DONE: Over the past two months, our journalism for this project has included surveying more than 100 CC students and 180 staff, interviewing public health officials and former CC president Jill Tiefenthaler, and attending eight town halls. We’ve covered CC’s ever-changing plans for fall and how COVID-19 has been impacting members of CC’s community. We’ve pored over packets of guidelines for schools so you didn’t have to. Throughout, we’ve partnered with our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh to bring you weekly forecasts for El Paso County, offer context — and warnings — about the rising caseload, and explain the latest news in the science world. We’ve published 52 daily newsletters and written roughly 100,000 words. Find our full archive here.
⏭ WHAT’S NEXT: Feedback from all of you has been too encouraging for us to stop now, as we had originally intended. But we do have to step back and regroup while we transition into our regular jobs as students and faculty during the school year. We can’t say for sure what’s coming next, but our goal is for you to continue to find our newsletters in some form, though with less frequency. We’re exploring options for how to make this project sustainable, and will let you know where and how to stay informed about Colorado College, higher-ed, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the meantime, our inbox is open. You can reach us at ccreportingproject@gmail.com.
Now we’d like to introduce you to some of the team behind the reporting you’ve been reading. You haven’t seen their names on any bylines, but with the exception of just a few briefs, these two students have been responsible for the content appearing in your inbox each morning this summer.
Meet the student reporters — *wait, let me start over* — meet the reporters, Arielle Gordon and Miriam Brown, behind this project
Interview conducted by Corey Hutchins, instructor in Colorado College’s Journalism Institute and a faculty collaborator on the project. Edited for length and clarity.
First off, tell everyone about yourselves and your connection to this newsletter
Gordon: I’m a rising senior majoring in history and political science, minoring in journalism. Along with Miriam, I was one of the co-editors of the student newspaper, The Catalyst. The two of us are also going to step into the role of co-presidents of Cutler Publications, which is the independent board that oversees the student publications on campus. So it was kind of a natural fit for all of us to come together to work on this over the summer to keep student journalism going at Colorado College when most of the publications take a break.
Brown: I’m also a rising senior and journalism minor. Arielle and I have been working together since the first semester of my freshman year when I joined The Catalyst as editor for the Life section. Because Arielle and I have worked together so extensively in the past it makes sense that we would work together on this project.
Bring our readers into what the process was like for you reporting daily on a small private higher-ed institution
Brown: I think being a private institution means that we really have to rely on interviews with sources. We reach out to a lot of people on a daily basis for information and aren’t necessarily relying as much on open records or online records or other things like that. We really get all of our information from people for the most part. But I think also, on the flipside of that, because CC is a small private institution we’re able to get interviews with people very high up in the food chain because it’s such a small community.
Gordon: I think because the nature of CC is very small, it’s very personable. A lot of these administrators we would email “Hello Dean,” and they would reply back with their first names. I think having that relationship and the administrators knowing what this project was and what we were up to and kind of realizing that there was a student face behind it, I think made it kind of appealing to them to talk to us. And because CC is so small it doesn’t really get a lot of coverage from outside news outlets.
As the local news landscape changes, newsletters are increasingly becoming a way for journalists to publish their work independently. And writing for them can be quite different than reporting for traditional news outlets. What can you tell us about your experience with this daily newsletter in that context?
Brown: The newsletter format is definitely different than anything I’ve done in the past, and I really loved it. When I start hunting for jobs after college, I probably will look for roles in newsletters because I’ve enjoyed it so much. With the newsletter format you have a little more flexibility to be colorful with your language. You’re allowed to have a little bit more of a writer’s voice. It’s also nice that you know every morning the newsletter is getting delivered directly to someone’s inbox, so likely you already have their attention. You just have to figure out how to keep their attention. It’s nice that people can reply directly to us and we can have a conversation with our readers very easily.
Gordon: I think it’s just the informality. Because we have a better idea of who’s reading it, we can be a little bit more direct.
So far your reporting has been pretty straight. You haven’t editorialized much or really let readers know what you personally think about your college’s policies. But readers might be interested given you’ve been so close to the story and the people making decisions. So here’s your chance: How do you feel about your college’s plans for the fall given what you know about higher-ed and COVID-19 across the country?
Gordon: I’ve kind of been joking that there’s no way that this goes well. The best that happens is this goes poorly. I think it’s just going to be a matter of changing on the fly, which is what nobody wants. So, I think that’s my biggest concern, or what to look out for: How will the administration respond when something inevitably goes wrong?
Brown: I think it’s easy for Arielle and me to be kind of cynical — or some may call it paranoid even — just because we are looking at the extreme cases every day and are knee-deep in guidelines and COVID outbreaks and all of the latest news of things that are going wrong. So I think it’s easy for us to think Here are all of the worst case scenarios. Plenty of CC administrators have gone on the record saying that things likely will change in some way — and we just don’t know what that would look like yet.
What was your favorite story to report?
Brown: I’ve really enjoyed the stories we’ve written about different members of the CC community who have been affected by this coronavirus or are working with the pandemic in some way. We’ve spoken to an alum who is working on a potential COVID-19 vaccine; we’ve spoken to a professor who tested positive for COVID but was completely asymptomatic; we’ve spoken with one alum who calls himself a ‘long-hauler’ because he just can’t seem to shake what he believes is COVID. So all of our articles related to the CC community and putting a face to the pandemic in some way, I think, have been my favorites.
Gordon: We had a lot of fun when we saw the story about Rice University bringing in circus tents. That forced us to look further, and we launched an actual story about what schools are doing to hold classes outside, but it kind of took a bit of a lighter tone.
Any advice for other students who might want to engage in journalism about their own college during this pandemic?
Brown: I think that student journalists are journalists first and foremost — you don’t really need the qualifier there — and students should carry themselves as such. Nobody knows a college better than a student who has been attending it for four years. So, I think in terms of knowing what people are interested in, knowing what people need to know, or what questions they have, students know all of that already, and if you reach out to the decision-makers I think they will respond.
Gordon: I think our position within the college plays to our advantage in that we’re relatable to our fellow students, but also to the higher-up leaders who realize we’re students and also part of this community.
Now, the big question: What’s your hope for this newsletter going forward?
Gordon: I’ve been very surprised at how quickly it gained traction and how much support it got — just in our subscriber numbers and the people reaching out to us. I don’t know that I necessarily expected this many people to want to read it every day, but I think we definitely now feel kind of an obligation to people and we realized how this has helped people or become something they can rely on when everything is so up in the air. So it’s the million-dollar question: what is this going to become? I think we definitely want to keep providing this information in some format.
Brown: We want to continue it and we want it to continue to be a source of information for people in this pandemic. I think our original mission statement was that we wanted to bring some answers in a time of so much uncertainty. And I think we’ve accomplished that, and I hope we can integrate this into the world of existing student publications on Colorado College’s campus so we can continue to do that.
Virtually Across Campus: Behind the Infographics
Written by Steven Hayward, Director of Colorado College’s Journalism Institute and a faculty collaborator on the project.
I’m not sure exactly why I needed dry ice, or why my mother-in-law was visiting at the time, but I remember her saying: “Isn’t there someone at the college you can get it from?”
What became clear to me as I tried to explain why this wasn’t possible is that she was working with a Marvel Universe idea of a college. You’re a professor, she was saying, clearly you must know some other professor, some scientist, who will have what we need. Someone with different powers than you.
Anyone who works at an actual college knows it does not work like that. Despite our commitment to the liberal arts and desire to reach across disciplines, we for the most part stay in our lanes. I’m the same. Though I know there is a building named “Barnes” on campus, I’ve been there only a few times. People assume I’m lost.
Part of what made The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project such a unique and rich experience was that it provided an opportunity to put interdisciplinarity into practice. That began with Miriam and Arielle — the two amazing students you’ve just met (and they are more amazing than you know!) — and extends to our partnership with Phoebe Lostroh, who has been tirelessly generating the viral forecasts that we publish each Monday.
One of the things that led to our founding the project in the first place was to provide Phoebe with a platform where her weekly forecasts could be found and shared readily and thereby become a crucial part of the discussion on our campus and beyond.
Phoebe lost friends here in the Springs very early on — she is a member of the Colorado Springs Bridge Center the virus hit hard in March — and had been generating her projections since the start of the pandemic. She was posting them in the comments on her Facebook page. We felt a broader platform would make a difference. “It’s interesting to hear from you,” she replied to my email. “When do we start?”
During our first conversation for the Q&A that accompanied the first forecast, Phoebe mentioned a group of five students who had been generating infographics connected to the COVID-19 situation. Thanks to funding provided by the Ruth P Barton Memorial Fund — it was Ruth who founded the Journalism Minor at the college — we were able to support their work as well, and the result was the incredible graphics that you’ve been seeing over the last several weeks.
At the end of this dispatch, you’ll get to meet them as well, but first I wanted to share with you two of my favorite graphics that we never got to publish.
One of the challenges about the pandemic is making sense of the endless updates that make up the daily doom-scroll. How do we render such a mess of information concrete for people living right here in Colorado Springs?
The answer was in these two amazing infographics, which compares the rate of infection to spaces and places in Colorado and in El Paso County that people know well.
The below infographic is a comparison between the rates of infection here and notable Colorado peaks:
This second infographic compares the rate of infection in El Paso County to “The Incline,” the decommissioned cog railway that people hike up in Manitou Springs. “This is considered an extreme trail and is an advanced hike!” the website warns. “The Manitou Incline gains nearly 2,000 feet of elevation over less than 1 mile.” The idea was to compare the steepness of the curve to the Incline — and what the students found was that the infectious curve was far steeper than the incline:
Meet the Infographic Team
My name is Rana Abdu ’22, and I’m majoring in biochemistry. I have been working from Colorado Springs this summer. I have started getting into digital art and have been enjoying trying different things out during my free time, so making the infographics has been a lot of fun.
My name is Aleesa Chua ’22, and I’m majoring in chemistry. This summer, I’ve been home in Los Angeles and have enjoyed working with The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project! While in quarantine, I’ve enjoyed embroidering and cooking. (I think I’m close to perfecting my Japanese curry recipe!)
My name is Sara Dixon ’22, and I am an environmental science major. I have been working on infographics from a suburb of Chicago. Before this summer I was never the type to binge-watch, but I have binged 15 TV shows since May!
My name is Jia Mei ’21, and I’m a molecular biology major. During the pandemic, I’ve been working from home in Memphis, Tennessee. I have been doing weekly Zoom movie nights with my CC friends to stay connected since the beginning of Block 7 and have been working remotely with the CC Education Department at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center on designing STEAM (“Arts” in STEM) interactives.
My name is Lindsey Smith ’23, and I’ve been in Aurora, Colorado during the summer. I’m planning on majoring in either neuroscience or molecular biology. I enjoy baking and running in my free time, and I am currently on the pre-med track. It was so fun working with everyone, and I learned a lot about COVID-19.