JRN 300: Your First Beat Visits

On the week of Jan. 24-26, we won't meet here, as a class. Instead, you and your beat group will make a field trip each class day to your beats to start checking them out and meeting with people. You may schedule and arrange meetings with newsmakers on your beats, like mayors or police chiefs or business leaders and such.

I ask that you make arrangements with your group and make sure everyone has a ride to and form their beat. Group together into as few cars as possible, please.

Each day, when you get to your beat I first need you to do something for attendance verification purposes: I need someone to take a group selfie in front of a town landmark (a "Welcome To ... " sign, City Hall, a police or fire station, etc.) and then have one person text it to me at 702-271-7983 before 10 a.m. each day. Everyone who shows up in the selfie will be counted as present; anyone who does not will be listed as absent.

Then, go about your business. There will be a few things each person will have to individually turn in after their trips.

First, due by 10 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 25 will be ...

* A list of observations. Tell me five things you noticed about your community during your beat visits. For example, was its downtown busy or dead or booming or kind of sad? Why or why not? Great story ideas can come from simple environmental observation, so look for things that stand out and are crying out for an explanation.

Then, due by 10 a.m. Friday, Jan. 27 will be ... 

* A list of possible trend or issue story ideas, based on what you found from environmental observation and interviewing passers-by during your beat visits. Please list three ideas. I will not hold you to doing any of these story ideas (though you absolutely may do them), but I want to get a sense of what you're seeing and how your observations are helping you develop things we can actually report on in the near future.

Finally, due by 10 a.m. Monday, Jan. 30 will be ...

* Questionnaire responses. During your beat visits want you each to interview three random people on the street and get answers to the following questions from each: what drives you crazy about living or working here, and why? What excites you about living or working here, and why? What would you like to see changed here, and why? What do you want to never see changed and why? And what question or questions do you have about living or working here that you'd like to see answered, and why?

You may tell people you are MSU journalist students doing research for possible stories for Spartan News Room, a public news Web site run by the school. And that should be your standard identification throughout the semester; you're not just doing stories for a class; the stories we do will be posted to a news sites read by the public. This isn't pretend-we're-doing-news; we are doing real news stories that real people will really see. 

Please do all these assignments in Word documents with the following in the upper left-hand corner (as we should with all assignments from here on out):

• Your name
• The deadline date
• The assignment slug (in this case, observations and story ideas and questionnaire responses)

Then, attach your Word doc to an email and send it to me at omars@msu.edu (that's omar with an "s" at the end; please make sure you get that right as there is a omar@msu.edu who does NOT forward misspent emails to me).

We will return to meeting in class as a class on Tuesday, Jan. 31 at 8 a.m.

Questions? Call or text me at 702-271-7983; email me at omars@msu.edu, or see me during my listed office hours at CAS 360.

Good luck, everyone!