My name is Alyssa Czernek and I’m a junior at Concordia College. I’m double majoring in English Literature and Multimedia Journalism which means I do a lot of reading and writing.
As I move toward completing my Journalism degree, I have to complete the course Investigating and Narrating the News. This course focuses on reporting about an overarching topic that can be broken down into smaller stories; however, unlike my previous journalism classes, this project needed to include multimedia elements.
This meant instead of writing a story based on interviews, I also needed to act as a photographer and videographer. This project has challenged me to think about telling stories in a different when. When I write I have lots of room to tell the story and rearrange the order. With photos and videos, that’s a bit more difficult.
The idea for my project was a bit difficult to narrow down. I’ve always loved reading and sought out activities related to books. When I heard about More Than Words opening in Moorhead, I knew I wanted to report on it. However, that idea was too narrow for the scope of this project. As I was thinking about how to expand my idea, I kept coming back to the idea of entrepreneurship.
It was a field I didn’t know much about and one of my favorite aspects of journalism is learning new things and meeting people I normally wouldn’t in my day-to-day life. I started doing some research on who I could talk to that would know more about entrepreneurship, but I then ran into the problem of my focus being a bit too broad.
I didn’t have a central theme to tie any of my stories together. This was stressful because for a while, I didn’t know how to narrow down my direction. As I kept interviewing people, a theme began to present itself. Everyone I talked to brought up the sense of community they felt was attached to entrepreneurship.
After I realized this, the focus of my project became how community sustains entrepreneurship. My interviews for this project have shown me that without community, it is extremely difficult for entrepreneurs to thrive.
