Jessica Terrell is a Special Projects Editor at Honolulu Civil Beat. She possess expertise in journalism, feature articles, blogging, storytelling, newspapers and 43 more skills. Colleagues describe her as "Jessica wore two hats during her time with us as associate editor at The Tribeca Trib. She was a reporter, thoroughly professional in her coverage of a wide variety of stories in Lower Manhattan, including the treacherous, immediate aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. And she took on much of the onerous task of dealing, remotely, with our web developer in the total redesign of our web site. Her skills, both reportorial and technical, are impressive, her attitude wonderful, her personality winning, and her desire to be helpful in our small organization unceasing. I can recommend her highly." and "Jessica is an extraordinarily dedicated and detail-oriented reporter. Her skills run the full gamut. She grasps story possibilities quickly, advocates them tenaciously, pursues them vigorously and executes them strongly. Too many adverbs? Not at all. I've seen her write moving profiles, celebratory brights and exhaustive analyses -- often in the same week.
A few examples? Jessica began pursuing the issue of charter school rejections in Orange County. That led to her discovery of charters operating under the radar without local oversight. And that led to a story about how the county school districts' opposition to chart proposals had led them to seek approval from agencies outside of Orange County -- resulting in the creation of a local school alternative overseen by agencies far removed from Orange County. The story helped capture the impact of this unintended consequence.
One of my favorite stories of 2013 was Jessica's profile of a hands-on local teacher. She captured his personality and sense of fun with visceral descriptions of his classwork. The story was so good, we elevated to an A1 feature, though it had been intended to run as part of a new package of weekly features deep inside the paper.
I use the story to teach my advanced journalism students to power of layered feature writing.
One of the best things about Jessica's approach to journalism is that she doesn't wait to be assigned stories, or to simply follow what she thinks you want. Even before we hired her, she was researching possible stories on the beat -- and it would become a familiar refrain for her to probe as to our past coverage to see whether a concept she wanted to dig into had been developed before. If we had done something, she'd find a new angle to exploit.
It was this type of thinking that led us to initiate a yearlong series around alternative approaches to education -- stories that brought Jessica into the local juvenile hall, among other places, to explore how teachers and students connected.
As with other highly skilled reporters, Jessica bases all of her stories on a solid foundation of data, develops with strong interviews of the stakeholders and presents them in easy-to-read, compelling narratives.
With all that said, it should come as no surprise that I give Jessica my highest recommendation."
Listed skills include Journalism, Feature Articles, Blogging, Storytelling, and 44 others.