CLASS 1: creating your speciality

Suggestions for creating your specialty

Basic needs
Whatever you decide, you need to define a field that will allow you to succeed in the course in the following ways:

• Provide you with an ongoing source of stories, photos and sound.
• Provide you with interactive opportunities.
• Provide an online audience with compelling material.

Here is an article about interacting with an online audience

Here are some suggestions for brainstorming

• Sense of urgency: If find yourself thinking, At this moment, on this campus, X is the most important issue we face, create a specialty based on X.
• Magazine angle: The Bear Claw is an online magazine, not the Web presence of a daily newspaper. Stake out a specialty based on an issue or point of view in the manner of magazine contributors. Examples: James Surowieki’s “The Financial Page” at The New Yorker; Christopher Buckley’s blog at thedailybeast.com
• Multimedia angle: If you are aware of an exciting subject for visual and aural presentation, go for it.
• Interactive angle: If you have reported for The Standard or for journalism classes and found your progress blocked by uncooperative institutional sources, consider a specialty built around crowdsourcing and distributive reporting. In this manner, you might accomplish a great deal without ever dialing the number of the uncooperative institutional source.
• Online angle: If you belong to an online community that lends itself to practicing journalism, consider crafting a specialty from those relationships.
• Your passion: Are you obsessed (in a healthy way) with some issue or group? If you can make your obsession appealing to a broader online audience, you might be able to create a specialty.
• Other people’s passions: Are you aware of under-reported groups who are thirsting for coverage? Consider such a group if you feel it is worthy. Examples are wide-ranging: hospice providers, roller-derby competitors.
• “Reality show”: Track the activities of an individual or small group of people, well-known or obscure. Of course, your hyper-local focus must have a broader appeal. You’ll need sources to provide context, the “big picture.”
• Newsworthiness: Look around and evaluate the possibilities using the tried and true factors of news judgment: significance, timeliness, proximity, prominence, uniqueness, human interest.