Extra! Extra! Read all a-bark it!
From the dog beach to the park, cherubs dug up all the facts this summer, while also spending some time with the furry friends of Evanston.
“For a broadcast lab, we had to go out and ask people about the weather, and my partner and I decided to go to the dog beach, which was really fun,” Eva Saraf of Statham, Georgia, said. “There were dogs playing in the water, and one owner had taken their dog to the dog beach for their birthday. It was really cute.”
Saraf, who volunteers at an animal shelter back home, said that she was excited to see dogs outside and in the classroom.
In her guest lecture “Reporting on the Whole Community,” Bloomberg News reporter Erin Ailworth brought her dog Clark, named after Clark Kent, to visit with the cherubs.
“He was right in front of me during the lecture, so I pet him a lot,” Saraf said. “I went up to Erin at the end just to see Clark.”
In her lecture, Ailworth demonstrated to the cherubs how a dog can be a journalist’s best friend while reporting.
“Like Erin told us, going up to dog walkers is the best way to talk to people because it lets off the pressure,” Ruthie Gravelle of Columbus, Ohio, said. “It’s an icebreaker. Before you start interviewing them, you can tell them that their dog is cute, which is a good way to connect with them. It makes it easier to get the interview started.”
Gravelle, along with a number of other cherubs, tried the technique out.
“I interviewed a woman with a dog, and it made the interview ten times better because it eased things over,” Mazzy Jensen of Clinton, Iowa, said. “You can ask to pet their dog and tell them that you’re interviewing them now. Then, they’re trapped.”
However, not all the cherub’s interactions with dogs were paw-sitive. Meher Sareen, who is from London, was also interviewing a dog owner at the beach, when a dog suddenly bit her, she said.
“They were running in the ocean, which was just the cutest thing to see. All of a sudden, a dog came up to me and bit me,” Sareen said. “It’s honestly not something I expected of the Evanstonian dog population, but I’m still hoping to rebuild my connection with these furry creatures.”
