Generally nice job from many people, but there was one area I think many people can improve on, and that's regarding your range of first-hand sources.
Many of you only sought direct interviews for one aspect of your story, entirely ceding other angles to reports you found online or the work of other media.
For instance, let's say you did a story on student voting, as many of you did. Perhaps you interviewed students about it, and certainly they are one important group.
But when it came to neutral experts, you cited other media instead of finding and talking to neutral experts yourselves.
When it came to background data defining the problem, you cited reports you found online instead of seeking neutral experts to give you data directly.
When it came to political campaigns seeking the youth vote, you cited other media and the work they did, instead of contacting campaigns and campaign consultants or even student partisan political groups (like the College Democrats and College Republicans) yourself to get that information first-hand.
And in journalism, we should be contacting all of those groups -- and representatives of the various angles -- ourselves.
That's how we explore subjects; not based on second-hand information, but on first-hand witnesses.
Second-hand info is for term papers. First-hand info is the raw material of journalism. That's what separates the two. And it's going to be challenging for you to get a good grade in this class if you insist on doing the former instead of aspiring to do the latter.
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