The fellowship is coming to a close and we still have so much to do. Tomorrow is officially the last day of the News21 fellowship but some fellows are still working on editing their stories. However, I am confident that we will all be done on time.

We have been so busy this summer but yet have found time to have a great time. From joking in the newsroom to hanging out after hours, we the fellows have gotten to know each other pretty well. I will miss everyone once this is over because we will all be heading in our separate directions, but hopefully we will all stay in contact.

Right now, I am finished with all my tasks for the fellowship and just enjoying the work environment and looking forward to seeing all of my hard work uploaded. I can’t believe this is already over.

I have always looked toward the South with curiosity. I have been equally curious about why the idea of living and working somewhere between the Mason-Dixon Line and the Gulf of Mexico continues to sound appealing. Sure, I have sojourned briefly to Atlanta, Florida, Mississippi, New Orleans and North and South Carolina. But a three-day conference or a daytrip is hardly my definition of an "experience."

So I was excited after discovering a 2005 Pew Hispanic Center report about a huge wave of Latino migration to six southern states, including Arkansas. My initial reaction was, "Latinos in the South?" But as I began researching the topic, the migration made sense. The region was flush with jobs in the 1990s, opportunities also drew whites and blacks. The Latinos who came were not just recent arrivals from south of the border. Many have left established "gateway" states like California, Illinois and Texas.

“You know we’re cousins, right?” 
That’s what a white surgeon said to my maternal Aunt Margie (even her birth certificate spells it that way) roughly four decades ago as she worked alongside him as a surgical nurse. The surgeon’s last name was Elder, which is my aunt’s maiden name, and he had visited some of our family members and wanted to share with Aunt Margie the family Bible.

Everybody has a story; particularly in the South. My teammate Chris Matthews (this one) says I’ve been thinking too much in writing this story about the tensions between the mixed race community and Blacks in Atlanta. I’ve talked to all the right people, got the great quotes and all that. But there’s something that’s just blocking my normal flow and rhythm.

After making the mixed-race timeline, my next project was filming and editing in-depth interviews with people who are multiracial. These interviews, which were modeled off of the washingtonpost.com’s OnBeing feature, were my main focus for the summer.

I was excited for this project because it let me do what I enjoy most: shooting and editing. These interviews tested my skills as an editor because I had to craft cohesive stories out these people’s own words. I couldn’t use my own narration or additional interviews to fill in gaps; I had to piece together some sort of a narrative based only off of what the subjects said.

Back in late January when I started the Carnegie Seminar (a prerequisite for the News21 Fellowship) I was so confused. We had various professors/researchers come in to lecture on various topics to include immigrants and racial barriers. At the time I had no idea how their lectures were supposed to build a foundation for the projects we would be working on during the summer, but as the semester came to a close I slowly began to understand a little bit more.

However, when the fellowship began on June 1st, I became more confused than ever. We were not doing what I thought we were doing (not that I really had an idea of what we were doing). I am not afraid to admit that this program is not exactly what I expected because I still learned a great deal by partaking. 

Growing up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I never thought of nearby Columbia, Md., as any kind of "case study." Columbia meant outdoor concerts at Merriweather Post Pavilion, oddly named streets and an upscale shopping mall.

This summer, my News21 group was dispatched to report on the mixed-race experience in America. As one of the nation's fastest-growing demographics, this group is literally changing the face of our country.

During the spring Carnegie Seminar, I waded through reams of data on voting patterns and attitudes of African-American voters. But as I delved into the scant data available on mixed-race Americans, it became clear that this is not a group that can be considered a bloc. Their experiences and leanings are as varied as their backgrounds.

I expected to come out of News 21 with a new understanding of multimedia storytelling. What I didn’t expect was a lesson in investigative journalism.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t thrilled when I learned that I would be covering people who identify as mixed race for News21. I had spent my spring semester in my Carnegie Seminar examining the voting behaviors of native and foreign-born Latinos. I was bit disheartened to learn that I had been assigned to a new topic that I knew very little about.

Having been on a press trip to Jordan for the first week, I got back to find out I was assigned to work with Kimberly, Shauna and Chris. According to a recent Census estimates, multiracial Americans are the fastest growing demographic in the country. These estimates, which were released in May, led to a switch in focus for some of the Maryland fellows. I was part of this newly formed group.

I was drawn to News21 by the opportunity to investigate the role of race, ethnicity and identity in politics, so I was particularly excited to get the opportunity to investigate the Native American political situation this summer. Learning about the complexities of this population has been particularly interesting, especially given its unique political situation and history.

I have encountered some difficulties due to the lack of concrete data, including the Census data that had initially spawned the story; I had originally viewed the data as a jumping-off point for my story rather than the end-all be-all, but have come to realize how important hard data is if you are trying to document a trend.

Outside of the Native American story, I have gotten more than my share of data working with our interactive data project, so I suppose everything has balanced out in the end.

Our 12 fellows arrived June 1 and were immediately thrown into multimedia training sessions and brainstorming meetings. They participated in tutorials given by faculty and top professionals on shooting and editing audio and video and on voicing scripts. (And they quickly began giving tutorials to each other – beginning with an excellent one from Jose Castillo on shooting and editing photos.) The fellows were taught how to use a software tool to analyze the huge data sets we had secured on voter attitudes, so that we could begin to create narratives about the impact of America’s changing demographics on voting patterns and politics.

I soon grouped them into three teams so that they could begin to conceptualize how to report, frame and present stories and interact with our audience on the three topics targeted by our Carnegie professor: Latino voters, mixed-race voters and youth voters. All three population groups are growing by leaps.