Short description: 

Your challenge for this assignment will be to create a short piece of journalism that documents how people you know are feeling about a current, local problem. The problem/issue that you choose should fall into one of the following beats: Housing/Neighborhoods, Economic Inequality, Climate/Environment, Labor/Work, Immigration/Immigration Policy, Education/Schools, Gender/LGBTQ+, Militarism/War, Police/Prisons. In your report you will need to incorporate an interview with at least two other people as well as your own narration. You could use audio, video, written journalism, or some combination of these media when you compose your report.

Turning it in:

• You can turn in your project on Brightspace, in “Assignments,” or you can email it to me. If the file is too large to turn in on Brightspace (i.e., if you made a video), emailing it might be the better method.

Specific instructions:

For this assignment, you are a journalist whose job is to report on a problem that people are dealing with locally. In conducting your report, you must do the following:

• Choose a subject for your report that deals with a problem that people are facing in one of the following areas: Housing/Neighborhoods, Climate/Environment, Labor/Work, Immigration, Education/Schools, Gender/LGBTQ+, Militarism/War, Police/Prisons.
• Interview at least two people about the problem. These could be people you know personally, people you work with, people in your family, people who attend your school, people who attend a school you used to attend, or people you meet while researching the problem.
• Create a piece of narrative journalism that tells a story about the problem. This could be an audio report (like a podcast or a newscast), a video (like a televised news report or a short documentary), or a written article.
• Include your interviewees’ perspectives by quoting them, paraphrasing their ideas and/or recording their voices. 
• Turn in your finished report on Brightspace or email it to me ([email protected]) if the file is too large for Brightspace.

Detailed guidelines:

• Report on a specific, local problem.  Some examples of specific, local problems are:
  • people are being evicted unfairly in several buildings in the Bronx
  • many students at P.S. 184 are chronically absent because they don’t want to go to school
  • community members are upset because no progress has been made on a new park that the City was supposed to have finished years ago
  • the LGBTQ workers at your job are being discriminated against because of their identity
  • your college does not have a cafeteria when every other college in the city does
  • an apartment complex in East New York has broken elevators and lacks heat in the colder months
  • there was bad flooding in your neighborhood after the last major storm
• Choose interviewees whose perspectives you are actually curious about.  You might choose the people you want to interview for this project before you know what issue you are going to report on. This is okay because sometimes it’s the conversations with people that lead us to the story. Don’t interview people just because you know them; interview them because you care what they think.
• Record your interviews.  Your interviews don’t need to be long – but they need to be substantial enough that you can take quotes from the interview and use them in your report. Recording your interviews will enable you save your material, listen back to the conversations afterward, and quote your interviewees accurately.
• Any secondary research you do about the issue should be referenced.  You are welcome to do other research separate from your interviews to make your report more informative, but this research should not dominate the report. Your primary sources of information for this assignment should be the people you interview and/or your own personal experiences and perspectives.
• Direct quotes in your report should be reserved for interview sources only. If you do decide to supplement your interviews with reference material (like information you find in books, websites or academic articles), you must cite all your reference material properly. Furthermore, you should refrain from using direct quotes for the secondary research. Instead, you should paraphrase any information that you want to use in your report that you got from secondary reference materials.