Final Portfolio

It's been a marathon finish and now this is the final product. I'm really happy with how three of these stories turned out.

First off is my brand new story about Battle of the Bands, with my favorite interview of the year:

Next up is an extreme home-makeover version of my Meet the Mormons story. This I did initially at the beginning of the year when all that was required was the five sequence shot:

And in third is the polished-up version of my Mitt Romney story. I thought I did a decent job on it a few weeks back, so not much is changed:

And then we have a fourth story. Being perfectly honest, the world conspired against me these last couple weeks and it was not fun. But that story doesn't need to be told here. Instead I'm simply hoping for a point or two for this official submission:

Cyber Monday deals stretched, crimping sales

Cyber Monday deals are being stretched out this holiday season, crimping sales on the day itself.

Retailers from Target to Amazon have been offering online deals since the beginning of November, and are promising "cyber" deals all week. That seems to have put a dent in Cyber Monday sales. Sales were up, according to estimates. But they weren't as strong as some were expecting.

IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that online sales rose 8.5 percent compared to 2013. That still makes it the busiest U.S. online shopping day of the year so far--a title the date has held since 2010. But it was less stellar growth than last year's Cyber Monday, when online sales jumped more than 20 percent.

Some people also felt that prices weren't quite as cheap as they were hoping.

Mark Johnson, a public health major at Brigham Young University, said, "It wasn't as cheap as I was expecting it to be compared to Black Friday. Black Friday had a lot more deals."