The first step in getting your IS story in motion will be to “surround the story” by understanding all sorts of background information about your topic. To do this, you’ll focus first on documentary sources. As you’ll learn in J202, we use two kinds of documentary sources:
- secondary sources: previously published information, like an NBC news story or a piece in the Wall Street Journal (you must have at least two distinct secondary sources)
- primary sources: documentary information that hasn’t already been processed by another reporter, such as research studies in academic journals, data from a government website, marketing materials produced by an organization or speeches made by a candidate (you must have at least two distinct primary sources)
This assignment, then, has four steps:
- gather secondary source documentary information related to your topic
- gather primary source documentary information related to your topic
- analyze all that information and find the most interesting insights into your topic
- pull the 10 best into a text “listicle” (learn more about this story type in The Media Handbook but don’t worry about images at this point) — at least five of the items must come from your primary sources
You are writing this listicle for an audience, so each item must be interesting enough to make someone truly care about your topic.
***You MUST attribute your information throughout the listicle and include a paragraph listing your sources at the bottom of the listicle.***
Submit your listicle as a Word Doc to the Canvas folder by the deadline.
Here’s a list from Wired on the Mueller report to give you an example.