I’ve been at The Daily Tar Heel almost as long as I’ve been at UNC, and at the end of every semester, I have a similar thought: there’s so much we could have dug into, and so much more that I wish I would have done.
I felt that way as a staff writer and then as a senior writer on the University desk, where I mainly reported on labor. There were so many deeper stories I wanted to do about the ways our university system works, who works for it and how they get treated. I felt that way when I was Enterprise Managing Editor in fall 2023, doing my first real investigations on Title IX issues in sports and student activism. I even felt that way last semester when I was abroad and looking at our well-intentioned but often surface-level coverage of everything that happened as the year came to an end.
My goal for the end of my final year at the University is to feel that way just a little bit less. I think it's an achievable goal because this time around, instead of being a desk writer or even a solo-editor, I’ll be the head editor running a desk dedicated to those deeper stories: the Special Projects desk.
In the past, this desk has been like The Daily Tar Heel’s own little investigations team. We have let our most ambitious and experienced reporters come together and follow their instincts with the full support of the paper behind them. It will be a similar concept this year but with some small differences and a little more focus.
Our writers are going to come from a variety of backgrounds and have a wide variety of interests. We will be focusing on accountable journalism, longer-term investigative projects and connections between a few key issues and pretty much every smaller topic we report on.
A big goal of ours is to look at bigger systems, like our University and local governments, and the ways they work and don’t work for our community. We will be thinking, writing and reporting about these topics carefully with a special emphasis on who suffers and who gets left behind when systems don't work how they're supposed to (or work exactly how they are supposed to).
As a journalist, I really believe in our work as a medium of education and public service. I think it is our job to think deeply about what our communities need to know and do our best to provide that knowledge. Part of that is the daily coverage our paper is really good at doing, but the other part, the part we've been missing, comes from more dedicated teams like our desk.
My goal for this desk and my personal goal for the end of this year is to feel like our work is a little bit less unfinished than it usually is. While I can't promise we'll catch every story, I can guarantee that we'll dig deeply into every project we take on.
