For the past three months, Medill junior Henry Rosoff has been living by himself in a hotel in Sioux Falls, S.D. After eating a continental breakfast, Rosoff tries to start his car, but freezing morning temperatures slow him down. The gas tank guzzles Rosoff’s cash – because there are no nearby oil refineries, gas prices are even higher than in Evanston.
For his Journalism Residency, Rosoff is interning at a broadcast news station in Sioux Falls, and enduring a winter that makes Evanston seem balmy. “I feel like Chicago gets the reputation of being so cold because there are a lot of people to complain about it. There aren’t a lot of people here to complain about it, but (the winter) could kick Chicago’s butt any day, ” Rosoff says. Reporters at his station accuse him of being a “city boy” with no cold weather tolerance.
After arriving in Sioux Falls, Rosoff was welcomed by 10 straight days of subzero weather and biting wind chill factors of negative 30 degrees. “Reporting outside has been awful,” he says. “I can wrap up all of my stories with ‘it’s fricking cold outside’ and people don’t seem to get tired of it.” Rosoff understands their continued fixation with the weather – his car’s battery has already died once, and he has woken up to a wheezing carburetor on numerous frigid mornings.
Jenny Yank, a Medill senior who went on JR last year in Topeka, Kansas, didn’t battle biting winds like Rosoff, but had to adjust to the “creepy” Midwestern isolation. Though Topeka is a city, Yank says she felt it was more of a small town environment, especially in comparison to Chicago. “Let’s be honest; it’s Kansas,” she says.
Getting out and covering stories was a disconcerting experience. Her first assignment was about a young boy’s stolen bicycle, which resulted in numerous follow-up stories and viewer call-ins from friends of the victim or otherwise concerned citizens. Some of her other breaking stories included 100th birthday parties and one person’s quest to run 50 miles on a treadmill.
Yank had to venture out of Topeka to even more rural areas of Kansas to cover most of her stories. Long drives along empty freeways made Yank feel even more alone. “I’ve never felt like I was in the middle of nowhere like I did when I was driving in Kansas,” Yank recalls. “Everything was dead and covered in snow-.There were no power lines or street lights for miles and miles. It was like the Wizard of Oz.”
Once she arrived on the scene, Yank was greeted with unexpected enthusiasm. “When you’d show up in a news truck, people would flock to you and want to tell you their stories.” Yank says. A Dallas native used to “angry and mean” Texans, she says strangers would offer to pump her gas, call her ‘ma’am’, and open doors for her. “Everyone was really friendly. And honestly, it was a little creepy.”
