When you walk into your Craft class in August, you will be assigned one of the city’s community districts to cover as your beat or you will be assigned a subject beat within a single community district. In either case, quickly you will be faced with some basic questions: How will I get started? Where will I find story ideas? What should I be covering?
The way to begin is to actually know something about that is happening in New York—that is to know the news.
This is the first e-mail that will help you do that. Three to four days a week, I will select and send a story that will give you the news foundation you will need, with a little commentary to explain why the story is important. You can find the pieces on the class blog and Facebook page as well.
Every two weeks or so, I will send a practice quiz so you can test how well you have identified and absorbed the key points. During orientation, we’ll do another quiz — only this time, there will be prizes for the top three scores.
The point here is not to annoy, but to get everyone in the habit of identifying important local stories and absorbing information that could be critical to your future coverage. It’s why we have news quizzes most weeks in Craft class. Be on top of the news, particularly in your area of coverage, is essential for any journalist.
If you have any questions on the stories, don’t hesitate to email me at greg.david@journalism.cuny.edu.
Let’s begin with top issue in New York in the past two weeks. Should the state legalize gay marriage? Here is the Daily News look at the impact on the economy and business. Note how they used a relatively old report, which had been covered at the time, as the key element in finding some way to advance a story and go beyond the political maneuvering.
If you click on “news of the day” under “Categories” to the right, you will always be able to find whatever news items have been posted.
Happy reading,
Professor Greg David