Poynter wants to use “Your Turn” to showcase excellent student reporting. If you have examples of in-depth or enterprise reporting, send us a link so we can see what your paper is doing and acknowledge good work.
Here’s a great example of good on-the-spot reporting about a school shooting. You may never cover a shooting, but you can still be presistent, thorough and react quickly when something newsworthy happens at your school.
Last spring, Steve Thompson, the newspaper editor at Dow High School in Midland, Mich., was in class when word spread of a shooting in the parking lot. A student turned a gun on his former girlfriend then shot himself.
Thompson wanted to get to the scene as fast as possible.
Thompson wanted to get to the scene as fast as possible.
“Right after the first shots were fired, the school went on lockdown. But, with my reporter’s notebook in hand. I ran to the cafeteria to see what was going on,” Thompson wrote in Extra, the supplement to Journalism Education Today, the magazine of the Journalism Education Association.
Surrounded by local media, law enforcement, parents and teachers questioning his motives and trying to keep students from looking out the windows, Thompson recorded the day’s events on paper as well on camera. He was the first reporter to speak with the wounded girl’s mother.
The staff produced a special edition a week later, incorporating new information from the principal, the girl’s mother and eyewitnesses.
