I know the background assignment was two weeks ago (that was fun... can we do that again?) but here is some additional info on me: I currently work for Michigan Television. I have also had stints at WOLV, still work at WCBN Sports on radio and for their blog, and completed an internship at the highest-rated local TV station in Detroit (WXYZ-TV) over the summer. Now, with all that said.... why is this assignment so difficult?!?!
With all that experience, I am still having trouble coming up with ideas. I guess you could say I want to go out my senior year with a bang and an awesome news story I'm a little torn between going for the ground-breaking emotional story and or just going with a solid feature story. I'm sticking to what I know (sports) for most of these story ideas. Here are a few of them:
"From the Field to the Blogosphere": The University of Michigan Athletic Dept. is now allowing its student athletes to write their own blogs on the school's sports page, MGoBlue.com. It's the first time we've seen anything like this from their website. These athletes blog once a week about the happenings of the team and their daily lives. The ones I have read so far have been pretty good (the best one I've read so far is the Men's Baseball blog). I would do this by interviewing the bloggers themselves (getting footage or B-roll from the Athletic Department if we choose to do this as a video), as well as the people responsible for putting the blogs up on the web (sports information directors). I would also want to find out how much censorship goes on with what these athletes are allowed to write.
Possible sports to talk to/about: Baseball, tennis, gymnastics, golf, volleyball, and basketball.
"Put me in coach. I'm Ready to Play": I came across this story last year about a women's soccer player on the Michigan team. This girl (from Columbus, OH) walked on to the team when she came to Michigan after turning down a lot of other offers from schools to play. She eventually became a captain of the team this year and scored the game-winning goal against the Buckeyes in her final home game at Michigan. It's a pretty good story and one I think that people would be interested in hearing. But the logistics (interviews, B-roll, might be tough to get from the athletic dept. because this sport finished up three months ago) might be tough to get in place for good story.
"It's Hard Out Here for a Comm Student": A lot of us are going to graduate in 12 weeks and not have a job. What is the job market going to be like for Comm students when we get out (or even in 3 years, if some of us choose to go to grad school?) I'd like to interview some of the professors and career staff in the Comm dept. (and the University as whole) to give people an idea of what they are looking at come May 2009. This could be either a print or multi-media story (I would probably go with an audio track of interviews to go along with a slide show of pictures. Very similar to the one we saw today in class.).
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Matt,
ReplyDeletethese are all great stories. I know that your group has committed to your bucket list idea, but remember the individual stories you write or shoot don't have to marry with the group video project. I had a thought...you want to do your bucket list on going to a hockey game...could you combine that with doing the piece on athletes blogging as your individual piece. The reason I say this is that I think you would come up with some interesting stuff about athletes blogging, how much does the sports pr folks get involved, do they edit the blogs, what happens if an athlete posts something they don't want out there. There's a good story in there. But then I like your other two stories as well, particularly the walk-on soccer player.
I'll be free to talk about stories on Wednesday in class.
Regards,
Prof. Warner