Telling Austin through themselves: Inside UT’s newest journalism course

The Moody College of Communication’s newest capstone, Reporting Austin, closed its inaugural semester this spring, marking an important milestone for journalism professor Raoul Hernandez by bringing to life a course first listed on his University resume in 2018.

For more than a decade, Hernandez has sought to build a course rooted in Austin. Over a 30-year reporting career in the capital city of Texas, he has produced work across numerous publications, with his byline appearing in nearly every issue of the Austin Chronicle since 1993.

To Hernandez, the Austin expert, there was no better subject for a course at UT. 

“Get to know Austin,” Hernandez said. “If you need help with that, take the capstone because I’ll send you in the right direction.”

Generally, journalistic pieces are meant to exclude the writer. But for the capstone, Hernandez introduced the reporter’s notebook, or an opportunity to tell a factual story through themselves. A term typically placed on stories where the writer includes their own thoughts and opinions, the student’s notebook could report on any beat of their choosing, while including real people and experiences. 

The result ended up not only moving students, but Hernandez, who said after a lifetime of excluding “I” and “me” from stories, found the entries incredibly powerful.

“The writing was better because it was personal, more compelling, really moving,” Hernandez said. “There was stuff  that was read in that class that put lumps in our throats.”

For Eden Shamy, journalism senior, the reporter’s notebook required her to combine both her structured political reporting background and history of personal journaling to produce a piece that showed just as much of herself as the story.

“In a typical straight news story you write the what when where straight off the bat and almost summarize,” Shamy said. “Instead, I could open my reporter’s notebook and come at it with a (much) more personal feeling.”

Shamy was one of several students who used the assignment to explore personal connections to their beats. For Behr Rinke, a journalism senior in the capstone, that meant turning to literary communication — using Austin’s reading culture to both connect with the community and reflect on his own future in book publishing.

“This is the first opportunity where we were writing a stream of consciousness,” Rinke said. “In a narrative, almost like you’re peeking into mini articles, which I’ve never done before.”

Although the style of writing felt foreign to Rinke at first, he said as time went on and the Reporting Austin group learned more about each other, his entries grew more sentimental. 

“We all got super close and it was a tight knit group by the end,” Rinke said. “We got to hear and give feedback to each other and bounce ideas off each other and I haven’t had a class similar to that at UT.”

For one of their last classes of their Longhorn years, both Shamy and Rinke experienced a new style of writing through a prism of themselves, learning about Austin, the community and the stories it had yet to tell.

“I think we all found something that we weren't looking for, didn't know was there, and we all found it together,” Hernandez said. “That's part of what made it remarkable.”