CHOOSING YOUR NEWS STORIES

Choosing Your News Stories

The challenge to the teams is to present a well-organized, clearly communicated newscast.

To do this you must select, edit, and organize news items from the top international news stories of the day/week and in a limited period of time, to deliver a succinct oral newscast.

Choosing Your Stories:

• 1. Choose 3 to 5 stories. Do your research, check other news outlets, be detectives about the news… whatever is happening in the world on the day you shoot your piece should be possible news stories for your Update.

  2. You will not be able to cover all of the important or significant stories in the world so you will have to work as a team to choose and then summarize the stories your team feels are most important and interesting.

  3. Stories should be significant news stories of the day or days immediately prior to the day of production.

     1. Significant = “sufficiently great or important to be worthy of attention; noteworthy.” Please be aware that while you have freedom to chose the stories you think are interesting/important you should be aware that your choices are a critical part of making the project a success.

     2. Pick stories that:

        1. Impact a lot of people in one or more parts of the world.

        2. Affect the political or economic stability of the world, a region or a nation.

        3. Relate to major humanitarian issues, human suffering, success or challenges for people in other parts of the world.

        4. Are of great human interest to people in Middleton, Wisconsin, the US and other parts of the world.

        5. Are diverse in the regions they cover (in other words - try not to ONLY do stories about issues related to one region - gather stories from a geographically diverse collection of places and people in the world.

  4. Stories must be INTERNATIONAL. While the US and US foreign policy interests will be covered, you should avoid covering stories that are focused on the US and topics affecting internal/domestic issues in the United States.

  5. Not all stories have to be bad or sad… don’t be afraid to have stories that are positive or uplifting in your Update.