This article is part of a series called Backstory where I reveal how feature and in-depth stories were crafted. You can find more with the Backstory tag by searching “Backstory” in the search bar.
The original story was published here:
This was my first story of the semester written with Morgane Wauquier. We had to come up with an idea in a couple of days that would yield at least 1,200 words, be interesting enough to an Ottawa audience, and newsy enough to publish in September.
Just the weekend prior, I spectated a rodeo at the Festival Western de St. Tite in the middle of a semester. I had already completed half of the semester readings after the first week and had enough of academic work. I opened my copy of Canadian Book of the Road by Reader’s Digest from the last century to look for weekend escape ideas.
I flipped to the page where Trois-Rivières was, I was familiar with the town as I had visited on several occasions in summer. I looked a little way north and found a small town called St. Tite held an annual outdoor rodeo touted to be the “best” on the continent. I searched online to see if it was still going on in 2021 and promptly bought myself a ticket. Off I went.
While I was there, I had no intention of turning the experience into an article, I just thought it was something cool to blog about. When I returned, I retrospectively realized that it could have been a timely story because Quebec implemented a COVID-19 vaccine certificate system just a week ahead of the rodeo.
We decided to use vaccine certificates as a news hook to the rodeo and review case numbers immediately after the event. To fill up the 1,200-word requirement, we wanted to add in a little about the history of the rodeo and the town of St. Tite. We reached out to rodeo associations, the event organizers, and the municipal government but didn’t get any responses in time.
There’s plenty of material online about how the rodeo came about, but it just wasn’t the same without human voices. Thankfully, Morgane, with superior French skills, managed to grab a couple of people from St. Tite on the phone just days before the article was due. Without her, there would be no story. We just hoped our next story would go a lot smoother.
