Some Great Student Journalism in the Works
As the editor of this project and instructor for the class, one of my biggest problems is my unwillingness to allow reality to temper my enthusiasm for the students' ideas. This is a really great group of student journalists that are demonstrating a lot of self-motivation in the face of a very difficult assignment. At least three students have been met with "you probably won't be able to do that," when they've sought help from other professional journalists and UNC faculty. Those naysayers are no doubt better grounded in reality than I.
Let me give you an example of some of the work that students are doing, in no particular order:
Lander Atkinson is trying to explain how the simple act of skipping school can quickly lead students down a path toward dropping out and all the life difficulties that follow. She has found a great program called "Truancy Court" at Riverside High School in Durham. We hope to make the story interactive by giving readers the chance to walk through the things that can help or hurt a truant student's odds of dropping out of high school.
Kevin Kiley is trying to gather and publish searchable and sortable data about the state's annual "dropout events." The Department of Public Instruction keeps data on every student, but there are all sorts of challenges that stand in the way of using this data as the core of a news report. The difficulties are technical, legal and political. But I think Kevin is really on to an important and not widely reported story.
A group of students -- Eva Hendershot, Ryan Greene, Audrey Hill, Lisa Adrukonis and Erin Smith -- are doing audio-visual profiles of various people that they hope will serve as rich anecdotes about the human effect of the dropout rate in North Carolina. The subjects range from Latino students in Wilmington, to a man who dropped out of school more than 30 years ago, to an at-risk student and his mentor at an alternative high school in Durham. Their model for the final project? Only The Washington Post's award-winning "Fixing D.C. Schools" series.
Elise Greenwood is taking a look at the legislative grants that are being put toward funding dropout prevention efforts. She's asking the right questions of the right people and will be producing a story that will really help North Carolinians understand the funding process and decide for themselves whether it's working. Our latest idea? An interactive game that will allow readers to rate the grant applicants themselves and compare them to the one's chosen by the legislature.
Sara Kelleher is using her experience in both service-learning and her knowledge of Spanish to help us reach Latino sources and readers in North Carolina via online social media and Spanish language print and broadcast outlets in the state.
And, last but not least, Kristi Uffman continues to lead our "engagement" effort by using YouTube, Facebook and other social media to help add more voices and depth to our report while also helping our audience save, share and discuss the topics we develop.
It's exciting to be a part of this. My role will continue to be to help the students turn their plans in to reality. Based on what I've seen so far, I'm very optimistic.
- Ryan Thornburg's blog
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