Across the United States, many local news stations and educational programs offer platforms for students to develop skills in news reporting through the production of pieces that may be selected for broadcasting or streaming. These news reports can cover a wide range of types of media journalism, from feature pieces to hard news to community events to business stories to other categories.
As discussed in Chapter 6 of Moving Images (“Recording and Presenting Reality”), one of the most difficult tasks facing students when developing non-fiction projects is finding a topic that is newsworthy, compelling, and manageable. In the classroom, this part of the process can provide some of the greatest challenges for teachers. It is critical to develop a process so that students can hone their abilities to investigate, analyze, and assess sources of material and approaches to portraying the stories they depict.
Once students have determined topics for investigation, they work on pre-production. With such a wide range of types of news projects, there are many approaches that can be taken with the material, and valuable pre-production elements can be two-column scripts, story breakdowns, interview questions and contacts, time-sensitive events, scheduling, and related considerations. Students must ask: what are my images – first-person reporting, interviews, recording of events, b-roll or cutaways, archival, or other types? At the same time: what is the audio – sound recorded with the aforementioned images, voiceover, ambient tracks, or other elements? With all of this, some of the most powerful challenges that can be faced are ones of logistics, particularly if people involved with these topics need to be contacted and met.
Non-fiction projects are core elements to the work in Moving Images. In the realm of news reporting, for several years my students have been producing pieces that have been shared with the Student News program in Connecticut. Here are links to two pieces that have aired as part of the program. The first was an award nominee for this year (by Craig Gnatek, Brennen Yourous, and Tristan Skorupski): Suffield Agriscience Gives Boost to Gardening, and another featured work by Aiden Dultz was Businesses Helping Businesses.
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