A Journey Through Journalism

           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.”