How to Find New Stories For your reference

Keep an idea file Where might these ideas come from? What is the benefit of keeping a file of ideas and continually adding to it? How might you use it for your publication?

Read a lot about things you know little Why is this important? How will it help you as a writer? How will it help your readers?

What is your publication about? What does your publication cover? What is undercovered? Why is it important to maintain balanced coverage? The answer for you all is simple: Yearbook!

Be a tourist in your own town. What features might we write about our local area? Think of all the things that bring wonder to the eyes of strangers: sights, shows, structures, museums, cultural activities, food, music, theatre, etc.

Look for the “why” of a news story (extrapolation). Pretty self explanatory, but it’s always a good question to ask of anything seen or read. What does it mean? What was the message behind Thor? The Hunger Games? Harry Potter? Man of Steel?

Look for ways to broaden a news story’s impact This means synthesis by looking at common threads within a news story or series of stories. Why is it important to broaden a story’s impact?

Localize Take a state/national/global story and find an angle that brings it home and shows your reader how he/she is affected. How does localizing a national/global story benefit our readers?

Examine the Impact Consider how one story can affect a person or group. Look beyond the news story to project consequences and build a story around that.

Keep in mind… Reporters must dig deep to report and write well. They must do lots of research and interviewing. You are still engaged in journalism. Stories must be factual. Their presentation can be creative, their circumstances cannot.

Assignment You are going to build an ideas file. Step one. Take one of the papers or the magazines from the back. Step two, take one of the folders I have set on the table. Step three, search for articles that you could use to “mine” for stories. This is like the exercise we did yesterday.

Assignment continued… Step four, cut out the articles and place them in the folder. Step five, think about some of the angles you will use for these stories. Every week we are going to be adding to this file in some way or form. You will keep this file for weekly checks. Once we complete this module, you will be filling it with photographs and other materials. It will become a valuable resource for your work.

Obligatory Ending Step six, prosper.