Out-of-Class #1: Your topics

You should have your story pitches approved by now. I approved a good range of topics that include:

• RAs and the problems they face at MSU
• "Building your brand" by getting internships while at MSU
• Comparing off-campus life to on-campus life
• Libraries in the age of the Internet
• Students struggling with weight issues at MSU (2 people working on this angle!)
• Students working to pay for school
• The "rape trail" legend at MSU
• Liberal arts majors looking for tech jobs
• Preventing sexual assault at MSU
• How Title IX changes can affect MSU
• Bikers vs. walkers at MSU
• How cell phone use affects everyday students
• Pollution in the Red Cedar River
• Booze at MSU
• How international students view free speech here

Overall, a good bunch.. Here were some issues with the pitches:

• A lack of neutral experts. Very few pitches listed any. Our final stories will need neutral experts quoted within. Please review the earlier blog posts regarding neutral experts or see me ASAP if you have any questions or concerns.
• Citing other news media and journalists. As journalists, we need to do our own work and not crib info from other news articles and reporters. That means instead of citing a CNN article on students where they talk to a sociologist, we contact the sociologist directly ourselves and interview him or her. For term papers citing news articles is okay but for journalism we do our own first-hand reporting.
• Source choices that can be better. We should NOT be interviewing teachers we have or have had. That is a conflict of interest, especially if you have them now and they control your grade. You should NOT interview people with whom you have a class. You should interview people who have a relevant stake in what is happening; for example, you wouldn't interview a journalism teacher on a story about the drug culture among millennials. You'd seek a drug expert or a doctor or a sociologist who actually works on such issues regularly.
• Source range is too narrow. We need people in charge of the issue at hand AND people who are affected by the issue at hand AND people who are expert at the issue at hand. All three, not just one of three, Too many had just one of those subject groups.

These aren't unusual issues for students to have on their first pitches. But we need to be sure to get them fixed for the stories we actually turn in, and for future pitches.