A dream sparked
from her father’s work in T.V. turned into a lifelong goal for Stacey
Haynes-Moore. This goal has lead her on the journey from playing the game of
“Interview” as a child to actually doing interviews for a news station, her
journey has been filled with difficulty and new things.
Her father worked Media
Consultant where he would travel and meet news reports from all over the
country and talk to them about how they chose to report on stories, at home
though she would always be surrounded by the news simply because it was a part
of her father’s job. This is what all sparked this passion for the news and her
interest of writing all throughout elementary and middle school which led her
to become a student editor on her high school newspaper. During her high school
years Haynes-Moore took all the classes she could with news. The one class she
didn’t take though was Yearbook, while she doesn’t have anything against it she
never found it to have much interest, but that didn’t stop her from being friends
with the kids who took it. Haynes-Moore even went to a Journalism camp at the
University of Iowa, which she says helped her learn a lot about Journalism in
general. In pursuit of her dream she attended the University of Missouri and
majored in Broadcast Journalism until later changing her major to Print
Journalism because she enjoyed writing more and didn't want to be a “TV talking
head” and found more substance in writing articles.
Once she wrapped up
her University life she moved to Kirksville, Missouri and became a reporter for
the Kirksville Daily Express. Working there came with its difficulty
though, she worked through most of the day and worked on every day of the week,
this included holidays. Around a year after she joined she quit because she was
overworked and needed some freetime. Having seen Missouri for a good part of
her life she moved to Mt. Vernon, Iowa and became an editor on the weekly paper
the Mt. Vernon Sun. She later joined a small online magazine company
where she had to learn a bit about the internet. She liked working with the
small company because they got along well but when it ended up being bought out
by a bigger company she left because she didn’t want to work for it just
because it was a large company.
Haynes-Moore started
to feel like she wanted to do something instead of journalism that still had
the aspects of it, so she decided to go back to school and study to be a
Language Arts teacher because of her love for the subject, working with people,
and it’s general idea of writing. She first ended up teaching L.A. 9 at
Jefferson for her first job which lasted around 10 years. Then after a bit she
ended up at Kennedy as an L.A. teacher and the leader of Kennedy Torch, a
magazine that covers most topics a newspaper would cover. One of her favorite
parts of Torch is hanging out and having fun with the members on long nights,
sometimes on which they blare music from all sorts of bands including Weezer,
one of her personal favorites. When we asked if she would go back to doing Print
Journalism and/or Broadcasting, she responded with, “I have sort of a really
great career right now. It sort of blends what I like to do, which is working
with students [and] working still in media.”
