Autobiography

Danny Dougherty

It’s odd that I got into journalism because I love to write. After working on every facet of my high school newspaper I came to the University of Missouri-Columbia to learn how to write and report.
In my first year here I decided to work production shifts twice a week at the Maneater. I had page design experience from high school and went in to a workshop on basic quark so that I could take on some design work.
When I got to the evening workshop, the quark workstations were full and the editor running students through the program was already busy. Not wanting to have the time go to waste, I sat down to learn Macromedia Freehand.
During my freshman year I began to understand a new type of storytelling. Originally, when I thought of journalism I thought of reporting and turning up hard news stories. A year of working on charts, maps and all sorts of diagrams had me understanding that the news isn’t just about revealing corruption or informing the public. It’s also about making information accessible to people and keeping them interested day to day. While most of what I did, that could really be considered newsworthy, consisted of charts and maps—I also produced a large share of illustrations and diagrams that ranged from describing how to change the oil in your car to illustrating various precautions the department of homeland security was recommending.
After that year, I returned to reporting. I was worked the cover public safety beat for the Columbia Missourian and found myself dealing with police officers, firemen and sheriff’s deputies. The entire experience was a bit of a wakeup call for me. There weren’t hard-hitting stories here, at least not in the flashy earth-shattering way. There were lots of tight-lipped public servants, a few distraught families of various victims and piles and piles of documents and data that were terribly hard to analyze. I’m not saying I didn’t get a thrill out of driving out to the scene of a fire and interviewing emergency responders, but I am saying that reporting wasn’t all glory.
Now, I understand the value of such news reporting. I found it exciting to cover the beginnings of a murder trial and to investigate the administrative policies of the county jail. I just never found the same enthusiasm I had when I was creating art to accompany stories. After writing an in-depth piece looking at overcrowding in the local jail, I was certainly proud of myself but I didn’t see the same impact in that story. I also suspect that very few readers made it through all forty inches of type or took the time to really analyze the statistics on jail population that I had littered across the story.
When, that next semester, I went back to working on info graphics—this time for the city paper and not the student one—I found the work even more interesting. I felt like I had a better understanding of what reporters needed when they came to me for help with telling their stories and I knew what research I was capable of doing to augment their reporting. I found a thrill in sitting down with a writer and sketching ideas out that would tell stories in a unique way. I hadn’t felt this thrill when sitting down with editors and talking about what strategies to use while covering a trial. When I had the opportunity to take an internship at US News and World report, I jumped at it.
At the Missourian I had a certain amount of enthusiasm for what I did, but it was always a part of my course work. When I got to US News there was an entirely different thrill. It had never really dawned on me that the University of Missouri was terribly different in how it did things. When I got to DC and started talking about how I had covered various stories in the past, the rest of the graphics department was blown away by the idea of a school running the city paper as a part of its curriculum. The other artists also treated the pieces I had done as professional work. Up until this point I certainly had enjoyed my work, but I had never really considered what I was doing my job in the professional sense. Working with experienced reporters, who listened to the suggestions an intern had on how to best convey the meaning of a story, was rewarding in and of itself. Having the opportunity to learn a whole slew of new reporting and design techniques and tricks was absolutely invaluable. By the time I got back to Missouri not only was a validated in what I had been studying in school, but I also had found that I really could help the overall journalistic enterprise by creating high-impact images that conveyed information in ways that blocks of text alone could not.
As I prepare to graduate, I hope to further develop my ability to look at stories and think visually about them. I also am working on developing experience at editing print graphics and managing other artists for larger stories. Finally, I hope to learn a bit about Flash and interactive graphics in the hopes that I will have an opportunity to help the development of the growing online journalism field. I hope to work for a publication with integrated art and editorial staffs and have the opportunity to not simply create diagrams to accompany other reporters’ work but to also help decide how to tell the stories they are working on and add my own understanding of how to communicate information to readers in interesting, creative and informative ways.