Week 2:
Introduction:

Well, so far so good. Well done to everyone who completed the first assignment. By now this means you should have some idea of issues that people are concerned about, and a list of 2-3 topics that might make interesting stories. Your job this week will be to decide on one story topic out of the three, that you will focus on in order to research and write an article. 

So, here’s your assignment for this week:

Step 1: Reflection

Firstly, let’s look back at the experiences over the past week. Please could everyone write a few comments and post them to the group page, reflecting on last week’s assignment. Please let us know how it went, how you felt, and what you learnt. It doesn’t have to be long – just a few sentences.

Step 2: Deciding on your topic

So, you have 2-3 potential topics. These are issues that were raised by the people you spoke to last week. Now you need to select only one as your article topic.
In making your decision, think about:

• Is this issue well defined (not vague or abstract) and of general
  current concern?
• Is this issue something people will be interested in reading about?
• Is this issue linked in some way to my work and the work of my organisation?
• Is a story on this issue do-able? Will I be able to find information, and people 
  to talk about it?

Step 3: Deciding on your story angle

Once you’ve settled on your topic, you need to decide on your ‘angle’ – the specific aspect of this topic you will focus on, the perspective from which you will tackle the story.
For example: if your story is about the poor quality of drinking water in your town, you need to narrow that down to a specific focus or angle. You could:

• Focus on the causes of the poor water quality, in order to try and find the reason for why the quality of the water is so poor. You would then focus on the water treatment process, the piping infrastructure, and so on. The aim of this might be to assign blame, or to come up with ideas about how the problems can be fixed.
• You could focus on the consequences of poor drinking water. How is the poor quality of drinking water affecting people living in the town? What are the health and financial costs?
• You simply want to make people aware that a problem exists. It might be that the has long been a problem but nobody is paying attention to it. By highlighting the problem, you want to ensure that those responsible sit up and take notice.

When thinking about your angle, ask yourself: “What story am I trying to tell here? Why?”

Identifying interviewees

Once you have settled on your story topic, you need to figure out who you will talk to about it, to get information. For a good story, you need at least 2, and ideally 3 interviewees, who will offer different perspectives. A good approach to many issues is to identify: at least 1 (and hopefully more) ordinary person who is directly affected, and at least 1 independent expert who has in-depth knowledge of the issue. If you want to go further, you could identify at least 1 person who has the power or responsibility to do something about this issue.

You need to get specific here, and you will need to do a bit of investigating. For example, it’s no good just saying, “I’ll interview a resident of X”. You need find and identify a specific resident who’s affected by the issue and is willing to talk about it -– a name and position, and some contact details.

Drawing up questions

Once you’ve identified your interviewees you need to draw up a set of questions for each interviewee. I would recommend you prepare at least 5 questions for each person.
The questions you ask will depend on the aim of the interview. If you’re trying to find out about a person’s personal experiences, you will ask different questions, as opposed to asking an expert for information about the problem. To learn more about the kinds of questions you can ask, have a look at the readings below.

Summary:SO: Your assignment for this week is to:

1. Post a few sentences to the group, reflecting on last week’s assignment.

2. Send me an email listing:

• Your story topic
• Your story angle and why you chose it
• The names of your 3 interviewees
• 5 questions for each interviewee

Readings:

From the CJA manual:
Asking The Right Questions
A journalist gathers information by asking questions. There are 6 classic questions that journalists are taught to always ask. These are known as the “5 W's and an H.”

5 W’s and an H

What? What happened? What is it? What does it mean? What will happen?

Where? Where did it happen/will it happen? Where did he/she/it come from? Where did it go?

Who? Who did it? Who is it? Who will it be? Who helped them? Who is involved? Who is affected?

When? When did it happen? When will it happen? When will you know?

Why? Why did it happen? Why did you do it? Why don’t you know?

How? How did it happen? How did you do it? How will you go about doing it?

Note that none of these questions lend themselves to a ‘yes or no’ answer.

It is also important to remember that you might need to ask each question more than once – in other words, there might be a number of answers you need to get, or can get, for each of these questions. So don’t think that just because you’ve asked “What?” once, that you’ve got all the information that you can, from that question.

For example: You find out that the mayor is going to announce plans for a new road through town, and you want to write a story about it. “Where?” is one of the key questions you need to ask, but you may need to ask it more than once: “Where will the road go?” “Where will you move the people whose houses will be destroyed by the new road?” “Where will the money come from?” and so on.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

Interview Questions:
http://www.mediacollege.com/journalism/interviews/questions.html

Back-cut questions may be shot at the end of a video interview. Make sure you ask the back-cut questions with the same wording as the interview — even varying the wording slightly can sometimes make the edit unworkable. You might want to make notes of any unscripted questions as the interview progresses, so you remember to include them in the back-cuts.

Listen. A common mistake is to be thinking about the next question while the subject is answering the previous one, to the point that the interviewer misses some important information. This can lead to all sorts of embarrassing outcomes.