In groups, I’ll assign you to work through exercises on Newsroom101, and then as a class we’ll tackle some questions.
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Daily Archives: September 30, 2011
Friday, 30 Sep 2011
Moodle activity ( login )
Homecoming Story Pitch
Propose two homecoming-related stories, and identify one as your first choice. I’ll assign one story to each student on Oct 10. A 100-word “advance story” is due Oct 21, and a full 600-word draft is due Oct 26.
A good pitch will include
- a description of the story (“How adult students manage their academic responsibilities with caring for aging or ill relatives”)
- names of sources (“Jane Smith is an adult MBA student in her 40s who is caring for her mother, in her 70s, and her father-in-law, who is 82. Bill Jones is a WPF student in his 30s whose wife is rehabilitating from a car accident. Both have agreed to be interviewed for my story.”)
- news hook (“The ongoing debate about health care, Congress’s recent debate over making up budget shortfalls by taxing graduate student loans, and a ‘home for the holidays’ theme, when people spend a lot of time thinking about their family. Would be good for a Thanksgiving issue.”)
- quotes, facts, sources of further information, specific timed events (such as a local conference on aging and health care, or a faculty member who has published in this area)
Respond in the required format, before class
Letting Sources Preview Articles
It’s always a good idea to contact a source with follow-up questions.
Sometimes the source will ask to see the article before it’s published. The journalism profession encourages a reporter to read back the direct quotes that you plan to use in the story, but it is not considered good practice to share a copy of a story before publication.
The reasons are numerous, ranging from a source being upset if the version of the story that gets published is different (perhaps because your editor asks you to make changes, or something happens that changes the newsworthiness of certain details.)
It’s also possible that a source could leak your story idea to a competing news organization, and your generous gesture ends up costing you.
Read this metafilter thread on the ethics of letting sources preview news stories (which is a random discussion area, rather than an authoritative source, but I thought the responses do a good job of exploring the issue), and post your response. (You needn’t read the whole thread, just the original post and a sampling of answers.)