Post for Week 10

This week my team again had trouble finding a topic to report on. We submitted several that kept getting turned down, then we finally landed on doing a swine flu story. This was interesting because myself and another person in my group (Matt) worked together on a swine flu story earlier in the semester. That story was on how H1N1 affected students and teachers within the university, and this one was about the H1N1 vaccines. We talked to Health Department members, physicians, a school nurse, university health professionals, parents, etc. We got pretty lucky with our visuals, as Boone County's first walk-in clinic was scheduled only a day after we chose our topic. We got to go inside the clinic and take pictures of children getting shots, and some of them came out really good. There was a great picture I got of a baby girl crying as she was given the shot. We ended up writing a long text piece, doing a radio segment about shots containing thimerosal (a vaccine preservative that frightens some people), using a few pictures, and Amanda is good with Flash so she made a cool infographic about the different kinds of vaccines. This was probably the best work I've helped produce all semester, and our grade was fantastic so I'm glad the editors thought the same.