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Gathering verifiable and relevant sources is crucial to producing a good article. This is a skill I have worked on in my own writing as well as with my staff. Because I attend a Catholic school that is strict about what can be published, it can be difficult to go deeper with a source than I may be able to elsewhere. However, I have worked to ask pressing and relevant questions that contribute to stories while respecting the constraints under which I must work.
Before I approve a story, each staff member must submit a pitch sheet to me. This helps them to focus on how they will gather sources and facts and how they will construct their story. I give their pitch sheet back to them with suggestions for how to better approach their story if necessary, and assign a due date by which they must have their story done.
I have also helped students to improve their own news gathering skills. I encourage students to reach out to sources from a range of backgrounds—for example, a story in which a member of administration, a teacher, and multiple students from different age levels is better constructed than one in which only students the staffer knows are interviewed. Many younger students are more comfortable interviewing peers from their own grade level; I have encouraged them to branch out and interview students with whom they are not familiar.
When the principal of my school announced her retirement during my senior year, I immediately begun work on releasing a breaking news story. After that was published, I worked with two students to provide extended coverage of the issue. To do this, I broke the story up into three interview categories: students, administration and the principal herself, and the school board. One staffer chose to cover the reaction of students, the other chose to cover the thoughts of the administration and Mrs. Mann, and I covered the opinions and plans of the school board. Our story became a coherent and comprehensive recap of the decisions made and those still to come.
This story is an example of one in which I had to pull quotes and facts from a variety of sources. I worked with a freshman staffer and had her gather quotes from students, while I wrote up a summary of the event itself and interviewed the event organizer.
Together, we pooled all the information we had gathered to present comprehensive coverage of the event in a more in-depth sense than simply stating the facts.
When I am not running around my school interviewing anyone and everyone, I can probably be found reading the news. I have always been gripped by local, national, and international stories, and as I have gotten older my interests have only heightened (to the amusement of my friends, I currently have no fewer than 15 news apps on my phone).
But it is not just an interest in reading professional news stories that has improved my own writing. After the 2018 Al Neuharth and Free Spirit Journalism Conference, I was inspired to read the writing of student publications from around the country. Perhaps more than anything, this was what made me the journalist I am today. I began to get a feel for what the average high schooler is interested in reading and how they are interested in reading it, as well as how to obtain verifiable quality sources.
I aim to help my staff develop a sense of what makes a story verifiable, too. I have pushed staffers to back up their stories with statistics whenever possible with a link to the source, and urged them to record their interviews so there is a concrete record of their conversation. For example, a freshman staff member wrote a story about the future of making phone calls with the rise of text messages. The story started out strong, but with the addition of concrete facts, statistics, and links to research studies, it was significantly improved.
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