Reading abstracts:
The “50 Places to Shop for Story Ideas” article encourages writers to be proactive and seek out story ideas for themselves rather than wait for editors to dole them out. As a means to this end, it provides a laundry list of tips for reporters trying to get their creative juices flowing.
Although there are indeed 50 items on the list, they boil down to one basic principle: Be observant. This is kind of a no-brainer, as it is, after all, the fundamental tenet by which any journalist should abide. A journalist acts as another set of eyes and ears for the newspaper’s busy readers.
After my experience at the Alligator, some of the list’s suggestions—such as checking out the school Web site, reading police briefs, or checking community calendars—seemed pretty obvious. However, some of the other ideas were novel to me. For instance, I’m not much of a blog reader in general, so I hadn’t really thought about looking to blogs by Gainesville residents or UF students as a story idea. However, this seems like a good, creative way to see what’s on people’s minds, because people blog about what they’re passionate about—well, people who write interesting blogs do, anyway.
The MediaShift article, “Reconstructing Reporting: Revamping the Story Flow for Journalists,” also addresses the importance of new media in story generation, covering the way the reporting process has been transformed by our new technological landscape.Because I’ve had a computer in my house and been using the Internet to conduct research since the eighth grade, I’ve never really thought about how different the reporting process must have been before the advent of the Internet. It’s true, though, that I use the Internet to a great extent during the story generation process. The UF Web site, the city of Gainesville Web site and some other community sites have been frequent sources of story ideas and source contacts for me, and when I was working at the Alligator, most of the press releases we received were sent via e-mail, as was most of our reader feedback.
One result of this shift in the reporting process is a distancing of the reporter from an actual, in-person experience of his subject. As the article relates, “If the story relates to a place, the reporter might visit that place and get a feel for it.” However, this implies, he or she might not—after all, with all the images and geographical information available online, the reporter might be able to gather a certain amount of information without even leaving the office.
The question remains, however: Is this a good way to write a story? Legwork may be time-consuming and sometimes (especially in Gainesville) even a bit sweaty. However, there are things that a reporter can learn from going on the scene that he or she might not be able to glean from a mere telephone call or, even worse, an e-mail interview.This is not, of course, to say that new media are an entirely bad thing. Overall, the positives outweigh the negatives when it comes to technology’s impact on mass communications. Online media allow reporters to include a wider variety of material in the story package—such as audio feeds, interactive graphics, and interview transcripts—than is possible with print media. Also, readers are more likely to provide feedback about a story if they can simply do so in a comments section at the bottom of the story’s Web page than they are if they have to actually get out a sheet of paper and a pen, write a letter, and spend the 41 cents on a stamp to snail-mail in their letter to the editor.
The most interesting part of this article was its envisioning of the future of story generation. It imagines an extremely collaborative model of journalism in which audience participation assumes a central role, with readers communicating directly to the reporter what stories they’d like to see in print.To the journalist, this idea could seem a little unnerving, as it decentralizes the story-generating process, shifting the locus of control away from the reporter. However, in the face of declining readership, maybe this is the jump-start the industry needs to recapture its audience. With the advent of the Internet, the flow of information has shifted away from the top-down trickle of the past to a more branching, multidirectional structure, and this is a fact the news industry needs to acknowledge if it is to survive.Story idea:
UF professor William Logan’s poetry reading Thursday night at the Alachua County Public Library kicked off a semester-long series of readings by other UF professor-poets. This reading could serve as the news peg for a more in-depth story about the reading series in general, which is being presented for the first time this year.
The series was organized by Debora Greger, the first Dunlevie term professor of the Honors Program. The story would detail just what this professorship entails. For one thing, it comes with a grant, which is being used to pay not just for the readings, but also for a seven- to eight-student poetry “masterclass” Greger will teach at the Harn Museum in early February. The class is free to selected students and includes dinner at the café in the Harn. The story should include information like how much money was included in the grant, who set up and is paying for the grant, how the money will be allocated, and on what criteria Greger was chosen for the award. Interview sources:
– UF poetry professors William Logan and Debora Greger.
– A representative from the Honors Department who was involved in the awarding of the Dunlevie professorship and who could provide more information about it.– Another source associated with the Dunlevie grant.
– Students who attended the poetry reading or who plan to attend the masterclass.Potential graphic elements include a picture of Logan
reading or a graphic listing the times and locations of the remaining readings, ideally with thumbnail snapshots of the poets running next to each of their respective listings.For reasons of timeliness, the story would have to have been run Friday morning. Another option would be to focus the story on Greger, recasting it as a profile piece. In this case, the news peg of the story would be not Logan’s reading, but rather Greger’s, which will take place Jan. 24. It would include all the information included in the previous story idea, but without the detailed information about Logan’s reading. It could run either as a preview on the day of Greger’s reading or as an event-based story the day after. The sources would be the same, minus Logan. The graphic elements could include either a photo of Greger reading or a portrait of Greger, with the first option being preferable. It would also be interesting for the story to set the reading series in context against other poetry-related events the English department has sponsored in the past or may be sponsoring currently. I attended the Logan reading, and I was surprised by how many people were there—at least 30. I would be curious as to how this reading compares to other UF readings, as far as attendance goes. One further option for the story would be an informational side bar providing information about other poetry events going on around Gainesville.
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