JRN 300: Your Thursday 3/1 Homework

For our midterm, we will once again tap into the eyes and ears of our communities to see if we can find new story ideas. We will be doing again our earlier questionnaire assignment. The hope is that it will refresh your possible list of story ideas for down the stretch of this semester, and that you may have a better idea of what to look for and what comments really do have good story ideas behind them.

Each person is individually responsible for making a trip to your beat, though you may group up and ride-share as needed. 

* What do I do for this assignment? During your beat visits I want you each to interview three random people WHO CANNOT BE MSU STUDENTS OR EMPLOYEES 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? (With the Ingham County team, be clear that "here" means Ingham County as a whole, and not just the town in which you happen to be interviewing someone in.)

You may tell people you are MSU journalist students doing research for possible stories for Spartan Newsroom, 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):

• Your name
• The deadline date
• The assignment slug (in this case, midterm questionnaire)

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). Your deadline will be no later than 8 a.m. Tuesday, March 20. That gives you more than a full week after spring break in which to get this done.

Questions? Call or text me at 702-271-7983; email me at omars@msu.edu, or see me during my listed office hours at The State News Building, 435 E. Grand River Ave., 2nd floor/alley entrance.

Good luck, everyone!