Student Stories: Senior Skylar Rispens Tells Stories Across Platforms

Stories are at the heart of everything senior Skylar Rispens does. And, she does it all.

Photo. Web editing and design. Writing. Social media.

You name it, she does it well.

Skylar says according to her parents, she’s been passionate about telling stories even before she could talk.

She graduated from Helena High School and set out to study journalism at UM. She says she shaped her course work to dig into photography and writing. But, she’s also been the multimedia producer for the Montana Native News Project and during her trip to Korea this last spring with Montana Journalism Abroad, she was the web content editor as well as a photographer.

Sklyar in South Korea on the Montana Journalism abroad trip this spring. Skylar worked as a photographer and the web editor. Click on the image to see the site she managed. Photo by J-School student J.K. Lou.

Skylar does her thing. Photo by UM J-School student Emily Martinek

Nicole Gone looks out her kitchen window to her backyard where she hopes to have a raised bed garden of her own. Gone regularly attends community gardening events in Hays, Montana hosted by MSU Extension Agent Hillary Maxwell. Photo by Skylar Rispens.
For the Native News project in 2018, Skylar covered food security on the Fort Belknap reservation with her teammate Mari Hall. Click the image to see the full story.

This fall, she’s the photo editor of the new iteration of the Montana Journalism Review project.

Skylar writes, “With the guidance of the professors and variety of class options at the School of Journalism I have gained unparalleled reporting experience that has shaped me into a confident and eager reporter.”

This summer, she spent 10 weeks as an intern in Butte, reporting for the Montana Standard. There, she covered stories like the annual Montana Folk Festival to following an infrastructure bond proposal from committee to school board approval.

Her favorite assignment at the Standard was a world-class mountain bike race. She not only reported on the race, but documented it with incredible photo work too.