Katrina Tulloch, ’11, has covered almost everything.
“The journalism I used to do was everything from murder, music — it was very wide-ranging,” Tulloch said. “Now it’s going to be really focused toward helping people move to our region.”
The work she has done for the past ten years was as a reporter and photographer for syracuse.com and The Post-Standard, a newspaper based in Syracuse, New York. As of November 2023, she is now editor-in-chief of This is CNY, where she has turned her focus to service journalism and offering information about Syracuse to those new to the area.
“For people moving to the Syracuse area, they have a lot of questions about where to send their kids to city school districts, what kind of jobs to get, where to move, what our identity here as a city is,” Tulloch said. “So my job is to sort of create stories and videos that can answer those questions.”
Video journalism and multimedia are some of Tulloch’s main interests when it comes to storytelling. The rigid format of news writing left something to be desired for Tulloch, so she incorporates other forms of storytelling into her reporting.
“I think I’ve found a way to incorporate creative writing in journalism. I did not know how to do that when I was a student,” Tulloch said. “Now I feel like I’ve gotten really good at that. And because I did video journalism, so much of my creative brain is sparked by video editing, shooting my own video — all of that is just showing the world through my eyes.”
Working with different formats has also allowed Tulloch to reach a wider audience. It’s important to stay informed no matter what the medium, she explained.
“At the end of the day, people have all kinds of different media diets,” Tulloch said. “You can decide what you listen to and watch on your own, but unless people know the problems that are happening in their community or in their society or on their campus, you have no way of knowing how to solve them. So I really believe in people educating themselves on what’s going on in their communities.”
One of her current stories focuses on community and society, and ties together a local story of tragedy with the national fentanyl crisis. Another ongoing story of hers goes in-depth on manipulation and abuse within a Syracuse Alcoholics Anonymous group.
“If you work in investigative journalism, you can bring those problems to light and help people understand what they need to be doing,” Tulloch said. “People think journalism — I mean it has a bad reputation as always being negative, but the reality is that it’s both, right? You have to focus on the positive and negative aspects of life, of a community, in order to help people get a broad understanding of what it’s like to live somewhere.”
Though Tulloch always knew she wanted to be a journalist, she got her start at Allegheny’s own newspaper, The Campus. There, she worked as news editor and made lasting friendships, some of which led to other writing opportunities. Tulloch and two of her friends started Overkill, Allegheny’s bi-annual literary publication. This way, Tulloch could work on serious news stories while also fulfilling her love for other kinds of writing.
“We wanted something that was way less formal, kind of irreverent, subversive, playful,” Tulloch said. “And so we were like, ‘Let’s just make one, what the hell? Why not?’ And it really just started out as a creative project because we were all English majors.”
The ability to work on every kind of creative project she wanted to is a large factor in why Tulloch looks back at her time on campus so fondly.
“What I loved about Allegheny was I could try everything,” Tulloch said. “I wanted to do news, so I did the paper, I did The Campus. I wanted to do television so I did ACTV and was trying out segments with that, practicing photography, practicing camera work. And then I wanted to try creative writing so we did Overkill. So I wanted to hit all my bases and just really figure out what kind of person do I want to be.”
Tulloch encouraged writers of all kinds to sit with new ideas, even if they challenge the way that writer sees the world. That, she explained, is what makes for good writing and even better writers.
“This was told to me by one of my Allegheny professors; if you are feeling uncomfortable, if you’re feeling scared, if you’re put in a position where your perspective is being challenged and you don’t know what’s right or wrong, that’s a very good position to be in,” Tulloch said. “If you’re uncomfortable, you’re learning.”