Journalism gives this student something that school couldn’t
Meet Wyatt Meyer, Georgia high school journalist of the year
When Wyatt Meyer walked into the journalism classroom at Clarke Central High School, he didn’t know he’d found his future — it was “aimless.”
He just knew he was bored. The COVID-19 lockdown had dulled everything. He’d watched too much John Oliver. His mom suggested he take a class that might keep him thinking.
Four years later, Meyer, Georgia’s student journalist of the year from Athens, would tell his younger self: “You're not going to be kind of a kid with no direction anymore.”
Meyer found his passion for narrative journalism. He also covered the aftermath of the Apalachee school shooting, about 30 minutes from where his school was. It was one of the first pieces where he felt like he was making a difference with what he was writing.
“I remember reading the New York Times, Fox 5 and all those types of stories that all focused on the happenings,” he said. “All of it seemed to miss the people and the psychology of the people and the understanding of the people, and that's really where I tried to go with the story.”
Meyer just graduated, wrapping up a tenure as editor-in-chief of the ODYSSEY Media Group and preparing to head to Harvard University.
In this Q&A, he reflected on what it meant to grow up through journalism, the difference between school assignments and a mission and why he still carries a copy of “The New New Journalism” in his backpack.
His responses have been edited for flow and concision.
Why did you join the journalism class?
Right when COVID hit, I was on a whim. I had been really bored. I had nothing to do. I watched a lot of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” like archived episodes for no reason.
And just on a whim, I found an editorial contest from The New York Times for middle schoolers and I entered into that. I really did enjoy that.
But honestly, I wasn’t even that into it even after doing that. It wasn’t still super on my radar until we were registering for classes, and my mom and I looked through and found one that we thought was interesting and would be rigorous, so I would do it.
You described your first day in journalism class as “aimless.” What changed? When did it start to feel like a calling instead of just a class?
I don’t think it ever felt like a class. Just in terms of sheer volume, you get so much exposure to the same people, the same environment that you build that sense of community.
But from a purpose standpoint, I think a lot of what bored me about school was that it was just like being in the void.
The only person I could help or hurt was myself with my own grade, not that that wasn’t motivating, but it became much more impactful and interesting to think about the work I could do on a larger scale with the journalism program.
What does journalism give you that academics or other classes couldn't?
The way we think about school is kind of inherently insular — like if I solve an equation in math class, it is an equation that has been solved in a hypothetical situation. Even if it’s a word problem, it is hypothetical. Usually, it’s just figures and equations on a sheet.
When you think about high school education, maybe even in elementary school and middle school, you get opportunities to present at the science fair or you get opportunities to share what you’e doing. I always enjoyed that.
So, compared to all other subjects that I've ever taken in school, journalism is kind of the exact opposite, wherein the things I'm making for assignments that I get graded on are also things that people will read and will impact them.
It was never my goal to take journalism to get a good grade or to take it to learn writing or to take it to learn any kind of skill. I learned those on the way, but it's a place where I could start to impact people.
You covered the Apalachee shooting in 2024. How was that?
It was a weird experience because when it first happened, I was in my Spanish class, just hearing people whispering about it. The significance of it didn’t really hit me at first until I got to lunch and saw the headlines on my phone.
And then it hit you on a rush that, “Oh, Apalachee was a school that I played soccer against. I played at their field, where everyone was evacuated to, when I was a freshman.” It was a school where I had some friends of friends that I had grown up playing soccer with.
When you think about it like that, it's like how a song gets stuck in your head — I couldn't stop thinking about it because I couldn't get it out of my own head. I couldn't figure out how to process the things I was feeling, so I remember that that evening I had dinner with a friend and it was kind of just all we could talk about was that.
It was one of a string of shootings that had been happening recently. So when it happened, I had all these kinds of simmering feelings, and I wrote that editorial at first, which was received really well both by students and faculty, and that was one of the first pieces where I really felt like “Oh, I'm making a difference with what I'm writing.”
By the time I was covering it full time, writing about the further threats that were made in our districts, writing about school safety assembly, writing about the football game — just coincidentally, their first football game back was against our football team at our stadium. I was covering it along with all these major Atlanta news outlets. They actually syndicated some of my photos from the game.
It was this moment where this national and state moment is occurring, basically in my backyard.
I felt, in many ways, compelled to tell the stories that, nationwide, couldn’t necessarily be told: the stories of the people, the stories of the actual impacts.
I remember reading the New York Times, Fox 5 and all those types of stories that all focused on the happenings. All of it seemed to miss the people and the psychology of the people and the understanding of the people, and that's really where I tried to go with the story.
Why was that so important to you?
It was a piece that was missing in a lot of ways. On one hand, it's also just inherently what I'm interested in. I'm always interested in the ways people's brains react to anything. Before I even knew what I was reporting on, that was my natural inclination, but that's not to say it wasn't purposeful, because it was.
I talked to my advisor before and I was like, “Hey, I know we have a usual format for doing stories, but I want to kind of have some free rein, creative reign with how I write this.” And he told me, “OK.”
I think having done so many interviews with people affected and people involved in the response, the mental health response, it just became clear that people were the story. That was only talked about abstractly in other reporting.
The unique benefit of being a student journalist you might not any of the institutional resources, but you have so much human capital.
I know this person who's a friend of this person who can get me in contact with this person. My teachers, best friends, classmates — all that kind of human capital builds to where, at some point, I have a network of people that I know and can talk to who have been affected.
How did interviewing people after the shooting shape your approach to trauma reporting? How was your first interview?
The first interview was with Traveler Whaley, who was an Apalachee sophomore. It was just kind of a surreal experience.
Apalachee had the day off. I drove down the interstate to the school. It was empty when they didn’t have school, but also a little bit chilling in a sense. It was just strange that after such a monumental event had happened, I could go up and I did the interview on a picnic table 10 feet from the entrance.
That interview was emblematic of the holistic story because sitting in front of me was a person not much younger than I am, talking about the trauma it had ingrained. He told me that the night after, he’d had a dream about someone knocking on his front door, him opening the door and that being a guy with a gun.
After we were done, he walked me around the school. He himself was in the hall where the shooting occurred. So he was involved in it in ways that even other students in the school weren't. He walked on the hallways where the people who had been shot were lying.
In a lot of senses, like what we talked about was gritty, but when he walked me around the school, he showed me where he'd seen people lying on the floor. He showed me the halls he walked to evacuate to the football field.
That experience was invaluable to me as a reporter, but it was also just like a moment where you have to sit back and understand, as a human being.
What draws you to narrative journalism? How do you practice it now?
My interest in narrative storytelling goes back to the summer after my sophomore year. I was at one of the biggest bookstores I've ever been to, and it had a journalism section, the first journalism section I've ever seen in any bookstore.
I got a few books, including one that was called “The New NEW Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft.” I have carried that book in my backpack ever since that moment, because there's something about the idea of immersing yourself in a culture that reveals kind of that whole story I was talking about earlier.
I don't think in a high school setting — I think that the thing about narrative journalism is that it requires so much time. I’m required to be at school from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., so I can't necessarily practice in the same way. But a lot of the humanistic techniques of focusing on people, focusing on a narrative and focusing on themes as opposed to necessarily thinking about it in the most classic hard news journalism — that's really how I'm getting myself involved in it.
I'll write a breaking news story, but I'm more interested in the long-running trends of narrative. I'm interested in looking at the events of the real world through the lens of how it happens as a story in the most kind of classic sense.
If you could write a letter to your freshman self, what would you say?
I don’t know if I’d ask myself to change anything. But I guess my general piece of advice would be that going into high school, I was kind of aimless. So I think I would probably just say you're not going to be kind of a kid with no direction anymore.
Just to reassure my younger self that he was going to have an outlet to challenge himself, which I frankly never had before, and a community to balance those challenges.
Story Spotlight:
📰 Local Long Island kids started The Ditch Weekly to cover “the Hamptons from a new angle.” Its staff has swelled to 20 teenagers. Their goal is to distribute 2,000 copies of the paper a week through Labor Day, funded entirely by ad sales.
💰 Former student journalists at Western Washington University won a public records lawsuit and donated the money to establish an endowment supporting students’ investigative journalism.
🏛️ High school student journalists from North Texas and across the state have joined forces to advocate for legislation that would mitigate the impact of a 1988 Supreme Court case on student expression.
👀 Here’s a great piece from the Editor & Publisher: Like local newsrooms around the country, campus news faces formidable challenges, but the students press on.
Featured Opportunities:
Pittsburgh Magazine offers part-time internships for 12 weeks. Apply before June 13 for the fall cohort.
The Global Youth & News Media Prize journalism award, which spotlights successful youth collaborations that contribute to the survival of local news outlets, is accepting entries until June 16.
Press Pass is hosting a webinar on what it’s like to be a college journalist June 18.
BuzzFeed has four openings for its three-month, paid editorial fellowships. Apply before June 20.
The Innocence Project is hiring a digital content intern for the fall. Apply before June 20.
Applications for NPR’s Reflect America Fellowship close June 22.
ESPN is looking for a digital media intern to be based in Charlotte from August to December.
Nominations for the Student Press Law Center’s two awards are accepted until June 30.