Friday Memo #2

Since settling into school and getting a better grasp on my time and schedule, my MRP has had some progress in the last week. Even though I have not conducted any interviews since the end of the summer, I got in contact with an expert source that Sydney Wilson referred me to. Her name is Dr. Penny Kendall-Reed and one of her areas of expertise is using genetic testing to personalize individual treatment plans to prevent and treat disease. She is a perfect source to start off with since she is a co-author of several bestselling books and she’s had a multitude of health-related articles published. She will help me determine how accurate 23andme genetic tests are since she helps patients deconstruct their results.

Next week, I am going to start contacting my other expert sources from the University of Toronto and SickKids Hospital. I am going to have to determine beforehand whether they can each provide me with different, but relevant information or whether one person can help answer all my questions. It is not worth having three different sources when one or two people can give me the same information, so I will plan my pre-interview questions with that in mind.

Something that was brought up in my discussion with my partner on Wednesday was the fact that all three of my main characters are female. It did not really occur to me as an issue since they all have different stories to tell from unique points of view. The men that have reached out to me were less willing to discuss certain details, but I still have one male secondary character to include if necessary.

Lastly, I decided that instead of having one main character that I would give equal attention to all three. Since I am doing a digital feature, I thought of a layout in which all three characters have different pages. It would likely be too confusing for readers if they had to keep scrolling up to remember each character, so I like the idea of each character remaining separate from each other. I will want to have at least one or two digital elements for each of their pages, whether it be a video, photo gallery, map, timeline etc.