Recently, I got this question from one of youze:
When you say "schedule meetings" with people this week for information, what exactly would I be asking them to meet for/what would the meeting be about if I have no story yet?
Good question. And this is my reply, which we all should carefully consider:
Everything we are doing this week is about identifying and building sources so we can pick their brains about what is happening in their communities. We're wanting to see if they can help us identify what trends and issues are happening in their communities; what questions and challenges face the communities they live and work in; and general info about what somebody covering the community needs to know about its history and priorities and challenges and desires. So, these meetings will be part meet-and-greet and part brain-picking. The whole point is for us to discover what we don't already know about a community. The root word of news is new, and that's no accident. We need to discover things. Hope this helps!
Really, this class isn't mostly about news writing (though that's a big part). It's about reporting, and more specifically, honing the art of being thrust into a community where we have to discover news and come up with story ideas that aren't just based on an event taking place or something already reported by other media or something obvious.
We need to unearth news. We need to discover things. We need to find out what we don't know we don't know.
That's journalism.
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