The Partial Observer by Bill Bellen

The Recession of Reporting

My Senior Project on the Evolution of Journalism

From the first day as a freshman at Milford Central School, students hear talk of one dreaded assignment: the Senior Interdisciplinary Project, or SIP for short. Research projects are scattered throughout class curriculums in the high school, preparing students for the culmination of their efforts. Toward the end of junior year, students are tasked with crafting a SIP proposal. This entails choosing three disciplines of focus for the project, identifying a new technology to learn the reins of, and an overarching topic to guide an eventual thesis. This task is monumental for many, and one can see where the students’ anxiety comes from.

However, I looked at this project differently. I saw SIP as an opportunity that had never really presented itself to me before: An opportunity to dig into a topic and let my passion for the subject of my choosing flourish. Now the only challenge was what to do my SIP on in the first place.

As someone who has been infatuated with history for a long time, I wanted to incorporate aspects of this field of study into my work. In addition, my employment as a photographer at Cooperstown Dreams Park since the summer of 2022 has instilled a powerful passion for photography in me that had to find its way into my project. Finally, the consideration of my incessant following of news coverage, both local and global, led me to my answer. I decided that my project’s focus would be on the evolution of journalism over the last century. With the disciplines of photography, psychology and social media defining my studies, I got to work right away at the start of this school year.