The Writing
I love writing for The Little Hawk because I love learning. I have been able​ to share the things I learn about the world—from the people I meet to the events I attend—with the rest of the City High community. ​​​
Being part of The Little Hawk means constantly being surrounded by inspiration. As a freshman, I walked into the journalism room and saw the countless award-winning articles on the walls. I took that to heart, and ​three years later, I've written countless articles and won countless awards, all for the love of the game.
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Each underlined​ headline is a link to the original news article.
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News
Photo credit: Mary Lestina
A few months ago, a science teacher emailed me about the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute. Since I ​had never heard about it before and learning about new topics is my favorite part of being a journalist, I immediately jumped on it.
This year, two students—Estelle Ralston and Siena Brown—were selected to attend the program. In addition, Brown had spent the summer interning for the World Food Prize in Kenya, which I was super interested in learning about. I also interviewed the advisor for the program, City High teacher Mary Lestina, who introduced the World Food Prize to both Brown and Ralston.
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Recognition:
Best of SNO
Photo credit: Martha Willard
During the government shutdown, I sent out a survey to the City High student body asking how they believed it affected students. To my surprise, many students didn't care, since they thought its effects were relegated to lawmakers and federal employees.
I wanted to show the shutdown's localized effects, especially regarding SNAP benefits, to demonstrate to students why they should care about the shutdown. I interviewed a City High school counselor, Mary Peterson, who was familiar with its effects, a student, Ziggy Evans, whose family relies on SNAP benefits, and other anonymous students who were affected by the government shutdown.
This article was featured on the front page of The Little Hawk's November issue.
The biggest buzz at City High last spring was that Crumbl would be opening their first Iowa City area location in Coralville. I had never tried Crumbl before, but everyone I knew wouldn't stop talking about it.
On opening day, I ventured across town during my combined journalism/lunch period with two witnesses who could attest to the greatness (or mediocrity) of the cookies, Ethan Lalumiere and Grey Linley.
The best way to get a good story is to follow it and experience it for yourself, so of course I had to try some cookies for myself. Not only ​​was I able to try Crumbl for the first time, but I also wrote and published it on the same day Crumbl opened. I often write long, in-depth articles over the course of a few weeks, so this proved that I can also produce breaking news with a quick turnaround.
This was the first in-depth news article I ever wrote, and it led to my love for long-form news and feature stories.
There were three different sections to this story. First, I interviewed Elizabeth Mackenzie, the sustainability program manager at the University of Iowa, to learn about composting and composting programs. Then, I followed City High's Environmental Club to Horace Mann, a local elementary school, where they taught sixth grade students about composting in order to highlight its importance. In addition, Environmental Club worked on a litany of other projects focused on composting education. Finally, I interviewed district grounds manager Ben Grimm in order to learn about how composting would eventually expand to the rest of the district. ​
After writing this article, students kept coming up to me asking about Environmental Club. I had to explain that I wasn't in Environmental Club, I just wrote the arcticle!
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Recognition:
Honorable Mention, 2024 IHSPA In-Depth News Story
Feature
Last November, the Little Hawk Editorial Board held a meeting with our principal, John Bacon, to discuss potential story ideas. He mentioned that the Iowa Performance Profiles—a rating system created by the Iowa Department of Education—had just come out, and the results were surprising. Immediately, I was intrigued. I had never heard about the Performance Profiles before, but it sounded like an issue that significantly affected public schools around the state.
I worked with Tai Caputo, my executive editor at the time, to start investigating the Performance Profiles. Although they requested not to be quoted, we were able to conduct an interview with members of the Iowa Department of Education who had worked on the new rating system used for the Performance Profiles. To this day, it remains one of the scariest interviews I have done, but also one of my most proud. In addition, we wanted to get interviews and information from as many sources and perspectives as possible, so we interviewed students, principals, and staff members at different schools, parents, and a school board member.
I am especially proud of the headline, Targeted, alluding to both the status that DOE designated to City High and also the idea that larger public schools were targeted by the DOE in the new rating systems.
By far, Targeted is the article I have spent the most time on and learned the most about—it's also the longest, coming in at over 3,000 words. Following its publication, Tai and I received emails and kind words thanking us for bringing attention to the topic.
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Recognition: ​
Third Place, NSPA News Story of the Year
Honorable Mention, 2025 IHSPA Feature Story
Best of SNO
While talking with friends who were in the midst of applying for colleges, I noticed a common trend: they all wanted to get out of Iowa City. I wondered why this was, so I decided to explore the reasons why people leave Iowa and how it affects the state. For my research, I first sent out a survey to all students at City High asking what their plans after graduation were. This was important because not only did it help me figure out what influenced people to leave the state, but it also taught me how to analyze a large subset of data (something I had never done before). Then, I interviewed students, an Iowa congressman, and the iJAG teacher at my school. It was important to me to get perspectives from all sides of the issue–people who wanted to go to college in Iowa, people who wanted to go to college in Iowa, and people who didn't want to go to college at all. ​
Brain Drain was one of 18 stories selected by SNO as a Best of SNO Story of the Year out of every story submitted to Best of SNO. That's a 0.1% chance to win, which is pretty cool.
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Recognition: ​
2025 Best of SNO Story of the Year
Honorable Mention, 2025 NSPA News Magazine Cover
First Place, 2025 IHSPA Single Web Story Design
Second Place, 2025 IHSPA News Magazine Multiple Page Design
Second Place, 2025 IHSPA News Magazine Single Page Design
Third Place, 2025 IHSPA Feature Story
Honorable Mention, Illustration or Art
Last fall, I led two other reporters on an in-depth news project on phone bans. After hearing rumors that our district school board was considering banning phones, I wanted to know more about why more and more schools have adopted new phone policies over the last year and what our school might look like after a ban. I wanted to get as many perspectives as possible, so my team and I conducted interviews with students at City who had phones taken away from them; students, teachers, and administrators who shared their views on phone use; ICCSD school board members who were in the middle of creating the new phone policy; and students at schools outside of Iowa whose schools or districts had already gone through the process of creating a new phone policy. Although I didn't write the entire news article by myself, I led the project and edited what I didn't write to make sure that the style was consistent throughout.
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Recognition:
Honorable Mention, 2025 NSPA News Magazine Cover
First Place, 2025 IHSPA Feature Story
First Place, 2025 IHSPA Health/Science
Third Place, 2025 IHSPA Single Web Story Design
Honorable Mention, 2025 IHSPA Magazine One Page Design
One of the first stories I ever wrote for The Little Hawk is also one of my favorite. A One-Wheel Commute is a profile on Quinn Clark, who, at the time, rode a unicycle to school every day. To be honest, I thought it was bizarre, and I knew I had to write about her.​​​​
One of my core tenants is that stories can be found anywhere and you just have to look. This was a prime example. Clark, while unicycling, was inadvertently featured in Will Ferrell's documentary about his transgender friend Harper Steele.​​​​
However, you won't find Clark's cameo in the story—Will & Harper was released a year later, and anyway, it's a Quinn Clark profile, not a Will Ferrell profile.
Though I've written many profiles on many interesting people since A One-Wheel Commute, this one still stands out to me because the story is so interesting—how often do you meet someone who is in a Will Ferrell movie because they ride a unicycle to school?
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Opinion
Graphic credit: Isabella Young
Leading up to and following the temporary ban on TikTok, I noticed that users were migrating over to a different site: RedNote. But there were privacy and data concerns over using a Chinese app that was subject to Chinese laws—notoriously anti-privacy.
I wanted to take a different stance. I believed that safeguarding against Chinese privacy laws was futile, since social media users were uploading all of their data to the Cloud anyway. I didn't believe that Instagram's use of personal data was any different than RedNote's, and the difference was negligible since a large corporation had access to information about users anyway.
Photo credit: Lilli Moessner
This is the column that I struggled writing the most while being on the Little Hawk staff. After the Perry High School shooting in early January of 2024, I—like many other students and members of the community—felt injustice at the fact that school shootings were happening over, and over, and over. I started writing this column in early January, but I quickly realized that I didn't feel that I had a unique perspective that would contribute more to the situation than other people already had, so I abandoned it.
In early February 2024, however, my opinion editor at the time—Tai Caputo—and exec—Rose Flores-Rubio—encouraged me to work on it again. I ended up researching and critiquing Governor Kim Reynolds' preventative measures, which I didn't believe where preventative at all.
By far, my favorite part of this story is the lead, because it demonstrates how close to home it hits for City High students. To this day, it remains one of my favorite leads that I've ever written.
This column ended winning me my first ever Best of SNO award, which I was shocked and proud of—after all the internal conflict that it had taken me to complete the column, it felt like a sweet ending.
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Recognition:
Best of SNO
During a conversation in News Lab last spring, my friends and I noticed that a lot of bills introduced in the Iowa State legislatures were silly or inconsequential. Or, at least to us, they were.
In addition, trans rights were a contentious topic in the legislature. Removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act was the first bill signed into law by Governor Kim Reynolds.​ So, we came up with a column that made fun of silly bills before shedding light on what we thought was the dumbest bill of all.​
The specific sections I wrote were "Chemtrails," "Melting Ice With Beet Juice," "Iowa Cream Draft Horse," and "No More Hospitals for North Korea."​​​​
I find this column very polarizing—in addition to criticizing the Iowa legislature, it suggests that a section of the highway be named after Luigi Mangione and implies that a lawmaker was on shrooms. It skirts the line between commentary and going too far, but I think it does just enough to demonstrate how dehumanizing SF 418 is.
Graphic credit: Isabella Young
As Opinion Co-Editor, it was my responsibility last year to write the staff editorial alongside the other opinion editor, Isabella Young. For our first staff ed, we decided to write about chronic absenteeism and the new laws regarding student attendance. ​​
We, representing the entire Little Hawk staff, wrote about how students were not going to show up to school just because they were marked as "communicated absence" as opposed to "excused absence." We argued that due to the Iowa Legislature's disconnection from students and K-12 education, they were not equipped or knowledgeable enough to make such drastic laws about student attendance. In addition, we called attention to what we believed was the real problem: students who do not see education as necessary to further their future.
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Recognition:
Honorable Mention, 2025 IHSPA Staff Editorial
Sports
I don't usually write Sports stories—there's a reason we have three Sports editors and one editor for every other section. However, I do like to step out of my comfort zone once in a while, which is why I wrote an article on the City High dance team last year.
The Little Hawk usually doesn't have much coverage on Dance Team or other indirect competition sports. I wanted to cover the dance team in order to show the City High community what they do.
To write the article, I attended a solo competition called the Wild West Solo Showdown in order to take pictures and interview dance team members. ​
Tools and Resources
Otter
Like any other 21st century student reporter, I use Otter to transcribe the interviews I conduct. Before I start, I ask the interviewee if I can record the conversation in order to have the most accurate quotes possible. Then, Otter transcribes what we say as we talk. Later, I use the .txt files from Otter in order to pull quotes from the interview. I like to listen to the recording of the interview to make sure that every quote I use is accurate—in this way, it is helpful that Otter is a recording tool as well as a transcription tool.
Google Forms
Google Forms is the easiest resource to conduct surveys with. I used Forms to gather data for Brain Drain and Snap Gets Snapped. Asking multiple choice questions in a survey means I can easily create charts that quantify the results I receive from the form. Additionally, surveys serve as a useful point of first reference. When researching for Brain Drain, I wanted to see how many students were planning on leaving Iowa after they graduated, since I didn't know how the data from City High compared with the data from other schools that was readily available online.
Canva
After conducting a survey using Google Forms, I will make graphics on Canva to visualize the data I receive. Because I usually import my survey results into Google Forms, it's easy to copy and paste information into a Canva chart. ​
I use these graphics for myself, but also for my audience. I find that it's easier for others to understand specific data sets if they're able to see what's actually going on, so I incorporate my Canva charts into both web and print designs to add to the story.
First, the survey
Then, the spreadsheet
Finally, the graphic
