Media students mostly decide what NOT to cover

I ran across the following while reading a blogger's post today, and it struck me as applicable to student media:

The question of what to work on is under-discussed. There’s plenty of advice on getting work done: setting up good habits, creating productivity systems, project management and planning. Yet, there’s relative silence for the crucial decision of which projects to pursue.

Choosing what to work on is hard because you can’t know in advance how any project will turn out. If you knew what perspective was most worthwhile, the right choice would be obvious. It would simply be a matter of doing the work. But these choices exist outside of any particular vantage point. We don’t have this information, and we have to choose anyway.

A truth about journalism, and student journalism in particular, is that there is limited time and space for reporting and publishing and that most of our decisions involve what NOT to cover. We are curators, not stenographers. We pick and choose. 

Most of what happens in a typical high school class or activity or even passing period, MIGHT be of interest to someone, but we don't try to record each fact that we observe. 

It sounds great to claim that our publication will cover the entire school community and will strive to highlight a broad spectrum of life at our school, but that sort of breadth mostly leads to numbing readers and missing the significance of that most ubiquitous of American institutions: high school.

I was critiquing a magazine today for a state organization, and an editors' note made clear that the publication had abandoned its old "newspaper" strategy in favor of a magazine approach. So far, so good. And any transition is bound to be rocky.

But as I continued reading it became clearer that the staff has not fully embraced magazine style and relied too much on covering "topics," such as the history of our war in Afghanistan or unfair stereotypes of Asian students.

It sounds simple, but there really are NOT stories about topics. There is no volleyball story or physics club story, or biology class story. There ARE stories about volleyball players and coaches and spouses of coaches and managers. There are stories about physics teachers and students and their challenges and motivations. There are stories that Asian students can share that help "others" see challenges previously unseen.

I have written about Ernie Pyle and his "tell the story of one soldier" advice for reporters too many times for me to count (and did it again in the critique I wrote today). But the fundamental truth of "If you want to tell the story of physics club, tell the story of one club member" never varies. 

Back to those couple grafs quoted above: advisers and editors need to engage with the question of what to work on, and how to spend limited available time, every day and every issue or deadline. 

We can't do it all, but that should not be discouraging. Instead we are free to make choices that provide new insights and elevate people who might be overlooked or underappreciated or simply misunderstood.

When we begin our reporting, we might have only the most vague notion of what we might find. We just have to believe that we will find something if we spend enough time exploring and observing and questioning.