Out-Of-Class #1: A Good Thing!

In a past semester, along with the out-of-class story I also received this email from a student:

Omar,

I chose to stick witht the original topic I chose which is "post college stress."  I found out once I started doing my interviews, that the actual stressors the students are facing are different than I suspected.  I hope that this story stays along the guidelines, and is what you are looking for! I really enjoyed doing these interviews, and the surprises I discovered along with this topic.

Thanks, 

And this was FANTASTIC.

Why? Because this is journalism, and not a term paper.

Here's the difference: with a term paper, we have a pre-supposed conclusion, and we simply find facts to fill in that conclusion.

But in journalism, we treat it more like a science experiment, in which we start with an idea or presumption (or, in science, a theory) and then we fact-test it (or, in science do experiments) by talking to people and reviewing data and seeing what checks out and what does not.

Then, we follow the evidence (like in science) and in the end, our conclusion is not necessarily what we started out thinking; it's based on what we found along the way.

And in many cases, we discover things that change our initial perception of the story!

Sometimes, those changes are little. Other times, they are huge and lead to a completely different story than the one you thought you had in the first place.

Want an extreme example? Try Watergate. It started out as a routine burglary-at-a-political-organizing-office story. But the reporters kept checking things out, and eventually they found out that burglary was just one small part of a massive scheme to manipulate elections, run by the President of the United States.

The reporters didn't get the eventual story because they just treated a routine burglary as just that. They got what they did because they were curious, acted on their curiosity, and followed the evidence.

That's journalism. And that's what we did here, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Good journalism is about discovery and surprise and following the evidence based on curiosity. Presumptions should only be a starting point for all that, and nothing else.