For over two weeks, a team of 18 BYU students from the Journalism and Sports Media Sequence covered the 2024 Paris Games for The Daily Universe. The team embarked on a journalistic marathon, walking a combined million steps, and sprinkled in what felt like endless subway and train rides, while burning the midnight oil well into the night hours, to tell the stories of the Games from the perspectives of both the athletes and the spectators.
Each day, the students were tasked with producing a story, resulting in nearly 200 narratives over their time in Paris. The stories were shared across a variety of digital platforms associated with The Daily Universe.
The students’ days began with editorial meetings where they pitched and developed their stories alongside their peers and faculty leaders. Once plans were set, they ventured into the city in teams to produce them. When not actively working on their assignments, they attended Olympic events and cultural sites.
The students crafted stories for a number of platforms, including a daily social media broadcast, in-depth written stories for the web, graphic designs, and photojournalism.
It was common for both students and faculty to work on these stories well past midnight to meet their publishing deadlines. However, the long nights paid off as their stories generated tens of thousands of views and impressions on the web and social media.
If anything, the team embodied the Olympic creed: “The most important thing is not to win but to take part.”
In this series, Through Our Lens, our photographers flip the lens on themselves to showcase their Olympic experience and to give the audience a glimpse into the work that went into producing their stories.
