Introduction:
The process of coming up with story ideas is a combination of working in your head and working the beat itself to learn about the stories in the world. We develop wild and vague ideas, do research and reporting to see whether there’s “anything there,” and go out and report them. A budget is a list of stories that explains what the story is about, summarizes what’s been written about it in the past, and how you plan to go about reporting it, i.e. who you’ll talk to and what challenges you might find.
Learning objectives:
- Brainstorm potential story ideas
- Refine ideas into solid stories
- Develop budget and work plan for each story.
Steps to completion:
Background:
- Clark, part IV, especially tools 40-46
- Check out these student budget proposals and using Clark’s suggestions to offer three ideas that would make them better in a Module 4 post with the tag “budget critiques” by Sept. 7
- Brainstorming list:
- Expand your brainstorming list to at least 20 story ideas for your beat. These can be one sentence or even a sentence fragment
- Of those 20, take six that fit the assigned story categories (2 per category) and expand them into a full paragraph explain what the story is about and what local people or organizations are involved in them.
- Put both the big list and the small list in a post on your beat page with the appropriate category and the tag “brainstorming list” by Sept. 7.
Reflective:
- Class discussion Sept. 6: Issue blog post, budget readings, sample budgets
- Class discussion Sept. 8 Discussing brainstorming lists; provide written feedback by Friday evening, Sept. 9.
- Sept. 13: Budget conferences (sign up here)
- Sept. 15: Budget conferences (sign up here)
Exploratory
- Budget for A and B choices for profile, news analysis and pick-your-own stories. Put in a Dropbox Paper doc and send to me by Sept. 12
- Revise budget following story conferences.