Bruce A. Darnell's Portfolio

Prior to this article, I sat in a pretrial hearing and watched a year-long collage of the alleged torture and death of an 18-year-old foster child flash across the courtroom TV. A week or so later, the Belleville News-Democrat got info that DCFS showed up at the foster child’s house days before she died, and somehow didn’t notice anything wrong. I searched through court documents, attended court hearings, read various news articles, and made difficult phone calls to get this article out.

Following a year of enterprise reporting on university labor issues, including various protests, I wrote this article on a Board of Trustees protest and took all my own photos. Despite later writing blurbs announcing the end of their negotiations, this is the culmination of my union coverage at The Alestle.

Conceived as a simple piece on a southern Illinois festival for the Belleville News-Democrat, this morphed into something different altogether over the months I spent writing it. Stuff like Hogrock is what I want to cover and this story is the way I want to cover them—although I think my writing has improved since this was finished. It was published in SIUE’s literary journal, the River Bluff Review, in February 2026.

This is the longest story I’ve ever written, and took months of research and interviewing before I could even begin to start writing it. The result was my final project for Dr. Gary Hicks’ literary journalism class—concluded by writing about 3,000 words per day for three days straight right before the due date—which taught me the most about what I want to do in journalism. I went back to my hometown of Metropolis, Illinois, for spring break in 2025 to cover a strange saga that occurred the year prior, a story on a politically charged church that: Launched a crusade against the local library for allegedly planning on hosting an LGBTQ+ book reading while the library director, a member of the church, had secretly and without approval disposed of 15,000 books; had multiple members in powerful positions within the police and sheriff’s department, city council, and library board; spoke about how lunatics in the cities were coming for the kids in Metropolis; allegedly housed a Batman cosplayer and relative of the church’s pastor who had charges stating he sexually abused minors; and inevitably provoked town-wide resistance, including the creation of a vigilante watchdog Facebook group ran by one of my close friends who exposed that whole pedophile thing. And all that’s not even the full story.

I pitched this story to the Troy Times Tribune after seeing an advertisement alongside a crossroad. The event provided some good photos and hosted a very interesting UFO hunter who I hope I get to speak to in-depth one day.

This protest changed my perspective on journalism and the world. My coverage on pro-Palestine protests was the last I ever did for The Alestle, and I feel it’s some of my finest work. I was not on assignment but brought my camera to this protest and unknowingly found myself at the center of an on-campus encampment and later a mass arrest. I spent the next two days straight sifting through 7,000 photos and writing this article, and, in a weird and still unexplainable way given the bleak context of this situation, I felt fulfilled in the work I was doing.

When I walked into the Marine’s mom’s house to talk to her about legislation renaming the local post office after him and saw his face over and over in a shrine of photos by the door, I knew there was going to be more to this than just the post office. I became obsessed with his story because it was one where the more you learn the harder it seemed to hit. I’m grateful the Belleville News-Democrat supported that obsession for all the weeks I worked on it. I spoke with friends, family, a former lover, combat comrades, Mike Bost’s intern. Then found his gravestone to wrap it up. I’d write it differently now, but when I think of the path I’m on and want to keep walking down I view this story as the first real step.

The Belleville News-Democrat got a tip email from a guy who said he got shot by some sort of pellet gun. When me and the BND multimedia journalist Josh Carter showed up, we met a dude who enjoys riding his custom-made tri-wheeled bike with a box to hold his chihuahua. We learned he was shot by a gel blaster, which shoots water beads at painful speeds, and I looked into gel blaster shootings and found out they were a national trend. I found a few TikToks showing these gel blaster battles and embedded them into the article, but the PDF may not show them properly (as well, some have been deleted in the years since publication, for whatever reason).

The Troy Times Tribune received an email about a former Triad student who moved on from high school to the Air Force and then started working on rocket boosters, most recently working on NASA’s Artemis project to send humans back to the moon. I only talked with one source for this story, the alumna, and tried to focus on her sensory feelings working in a monumental industry to inform the audience what it’s like, since most people around here don’t work on rockets.

The Belleville News-Democrat gave me a chance to cover Governor Pritzker showing up to an event and I took it without hesitation. I’ve never covered a story involving someone as well-known as a governor, and wanted the experience doing a prominence story. Me and Josh Carter worked on this one. The most interesting interview came after Pritzker talked about SNAP benefits, when I went outside and met a man who asked me for a cigarette, told me he used to steal and flip color TVs in the 70’s, and then told me there’d be war on the streets if President Trump got rid of SNAP benefits. I’ve learned the people outside tend to give you better stuff than the people inside.

This was an assignment for the Troy Times Tribune where I got to interview an organization from near my hometown. I had some fun photo opportunities, although unfortunately did not get to take a photo of the flying car in flight since it never got permission to take off.

This was a collaborative piece with Madison Hutchinson after Snapchat added a shared college story feature. If you don’t know, Snapchat is an app that allows you to send photos, messages, and video to friends. They added the ability to sign up to a college list and then let people post to the story so that anyone also in the college list could see it. This created a sort of celebrity phenomenon as people began regularly posting to the stories and started to get noticed in real life. It also created drama as people got into public back-and-forth fights.

This was my final for Tammy Merrett’s Advanced News Writing class. All semester I’d been hearing whispers about a math professor—literally, people were speaking about him in public. I decided to do a profile on him for my final, since the whispers were usually about how he was racist or sexist and I wanted to find the truth. My interview with him was nearly three hours and involved him stating his suspicions of me, especially after I asked about why people thought he was offensive. I gave him a fair shake, and tried to find as many people who had good experiences as I had people with bad experiences. I didn’t find the truth, instead I left it up to the reader to decide what they think on the guy.

I was about to head home from the Belleville News-Democrat when my boss Todd Eschman said I should drive to Alton since a ginormous sinkhole opened up in a soccer field and would probably get covered by national news the next morning. So I drove there with Josh Carter and wrote up a brief sitting on a picnic table while Josh got a drone shot of the whole thing. It did end up on national news the next day, and our coverage was pretty popular too.