Interview story writing

Find and interview no fewer than five people of your choice on a topic also of your choice. The interviews must produce at least enough intelligence for you to be able to produce an interesting and unified story.

For example, you might wish to interview students, faculty and staff about parking issues on the campus, about using Blackboard orange 8 Web Express, about the pace of summer classes as they differ from fall and spring semester classes, or about whether and why students prefer to live on or off campus.

You may not interview any student in this class, nor any journalism student, nor anyone who works on the bottom floor of Wallace Hall. If you interview your friends, lovers, roommates, classmates or professional associates, you will need that many additional sources for this story. In other words, friends, family, classmates and roommates do not count as sources for this story.

All interviews must be conducted in person (face to face or on the telephone), and each interview subject must be made to understand why he is being interviewed and that his responses may be published.

All sources must be clearly identified in your story unless you are given specific permission to use unidentified sources by the professor before the story is written. There are no exceptions.

You may not quote at length from a newspaper, the Internet or other media, and you may not lift quotes or other information from such sources. Gather your own information from your own sources. If you must include secondary material, it must be fully credited to the original publication.

You will develop your own story idea for this assignment. The hypothetical audience for this story is Troy University’s award-winning Tropolitan newspaper, so you will want to cover something that is of interest to its target readership — students on the Troy campus.

Your story must meet these additional requirements:

• Use correct AP style.
• Include at least one hyperlink.
• Double-space and indent paragraphs, using the software settings we have discussed in class.
• Make sure your name is on your assignment.
• Length: 500 to 600 words.
• Sources: No story should depend on just one source. Single-source stories fail to explore alternative sides to the issue, plus they frequently fail to hold the reader’s attention. Even stories about speeches or meetings should be balanced by indicating conflicting opinions or including reaction. Stories should reflect the sense that issues are multifaceted; journalists do this by including sources whose positions, background, knowledge and interests give them reason to know and understand the issues and the impact of the issues. You are expected to do sufficient reporting to understand the viewpoints of the principal characters and to include the range of positions in this and all of your stories.

List the names and phone numbers of all sources at the end of the story. Failure to do this will result in a one-letter-grade reduction. You should not be surprised if your professor calls these sources to verify the accuracy of the information in your report.

The emphasis in grading your stories will be on strength of reporting, organization, accuracy, clarity, appropriateness of style for topic, tightness, thoroughness, word usage and readability, but you also will be graded on mechanics, grammar and AP style.