As one of the 28 students accepted into the Student Reporting Labs (SRL) Academy nationwide, June 21-29, Sarah Youssef (11) hadn’t expected the story she worked on at the program to end up on national television two months later. PBS NewsHour aired a story on a professional women’s tackle football team in Boston, Aug. 16, where Youssef was featured as an interviewer and producer of the story.
“I had just come home from school and I just got a text [from] my team leader [from the academy] and she’s like, ‘you need to watch NewsHour tonight and I just screamed, I was like no way this is happening,” Youssef said. “I ran to my mom and we texted my entire family. They were able to see me on TV and the rest of the country was also seeing it.”
Youssef said her interest in covering stories that are often overlooked was part of what led to the discovery of the women’s football story.
“At Westview, I did a story about our girls varsity team for basketball and how they were ranked top five in California at one point and [were] winning a lot of their games,” Youssef said. “I had submitted that story with my application. My team leader saw that and brought up the idea of ‘How about we do a women’s sports story, but here in Boston?’ We found the Boston Renegades and I didn’t even know there was a professional football team for women in general so it was really cool when we found them.”
In using skills she learned from Westview’s broadcast journalism class, Yousef found the production process less daunting.
“We used a different editing software there but [it was] pretty much the same stuff so I was able to get it really quickly,” Youssef said. “And then just having experience interviewing people really helped in Boston because I wasn’t doing this for the first time even though it was on a more important level.”
While Youssef was familiar with building and uncovering a story, she said nerves still came with covering a story with such magnitude.
“It was a little scary and intimidating,” Youssef said. “The day of my interview I kept looking back at my questions and hoped I [would be] able to talk well because there was actually a camera pointed at me so I wasn’t necessarily cut from the video. It was pretty nerve-wracking but it went really well and it was a lot of fun to get to know these amazing inspirational women and just talk to them like regular people. I was asking her about her life and career and getting to know these amazing things.”
Youssef said the latter part of production posed the greatest challenges.
“The hardest moment was one of our final days editing because we really thought we’d have plenty of time to edit, but it always goes to the last minute,” Youssef said. “We had our whole script [and] our entire plan laid out and then we flipped it upside down. Everyone has a different opinion on how they want to do stuff so the hardest moment was definitely that last editing day.”
Over the course of the week at the SRL Academy, Youssef said she was able to meet people of all backgrounds.
“I got to meet a whole bunch of professionals that had been in the career for a while as well as different high school students from literally across the country,” Youssef said. “We’re all here for the same reason, [but] we all have our own story.”
On top of being mentored by professionals in the field, Youssef had the opportunity to meet a correspondent from PBS and was one of two students chosen to visit and tour a radio station. Upon reflecting on the experience, Youssef said her ambition was what pushed her to succeed.
“Hard work can really get you wherever you want to go,” Youssef said. “There were a lot of challenges that we faced, but seeing the amazing opportunities that SRL has been able to give me because of that has been everything: from [being on the] radio to getting to meet another national news correspondent that wasn’t even part of SRL and then just being on the news. It was amazing. We produced a really good story and we were able to share it with the world.”
