ANNOTATED: Following the Flock — Q&A with Reporters Covering Technology, Safety — Grady Newsource
ANNOTATED: Following the Flock — Q&A with Reporters Covering Technology, Safety — Grady Newsource
Publish Date: 2026-06-13 11:34:00
Source Domain: gradynewsource.uga.edu
Reporter Annotations are meant to get to the how and why behind Newsource’s reporting through in-depth conversations with the reporters themselves. Read the conversation below, led by graduate student Alex Perri, for how spring 2026 Grady Newsource reporters Andrew Otten and Sonja Sutcavage followed the proliferation of controversial Flock surveillance cameras in Northeast Georgia throughout the semester.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Perri: Before we talk about the Flock camera project, can you tell me about your journalism experience before joining Newsource?
Andrew Otten: For me, I was mostly a reporting student. I’d taken a video journalism class, and I’m also a design and media minor, so I’d taken some creative classes through Lamar Dodd. But when it came to getting out in the field, Newsource really ramped things up. It felt much closer to a real-world newsroom.
The Flock project was especially different because it wasn’t a one-and-done assignment. We worked on it for a large chunk of the semester. It felt like all of those previous classes culminated in a project like this.
Sonja Sutcavage: I came into Newsource with a much stronger writing background. I’d taken Intro to Video and done a little editing, but I really didn’t know much about broadcast journalism going in. Newsource gave me more field experience and let me learn a little bit of everything in the newsroom, which feels like a much more accurate reflection of how real newsrooms work.
Perri: You followed this story throughout the semester. How did the Flock camera story begin? What did you know about the cameras when you started, and how did that evolve over time?
Sutcavage: Honestly, nothing. I didn’t know what a Flock camera was. I thought it might have something to do with speed detection. And we found that a lot of other people felt the same way. We’d stop students on campus and ask if they knew what the cameras were, and many…
