You're giving me a planet–I need a zip code.
When we story map with our staffs, it's that zip code-level coverage that we all need to strive for. Talking through the train wreck that is Amanda Bynes (@AmandaBynes) and seeing how yes, even with her as a starting point, we can generate solid coverage concepts–that was a fantastic exercise. The followups we did on illegal immigration, the NSA/Snowden story, and others drove it home for me.
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| Lauren Ramcharan Gutierrez (Corbett Junior High–Schertz, Texas) discusses one of her team's concepts during the story mapping exercise debrief. |
Paired with the understanding that everyone in our school communities has a story, I'm well on my way to blowing the top off my students' sometime limited creativity when we're generating coverage ideas. Our 2014 yearbook is going to be organized chronologically, with coverage packages delivered to our audience in the order in which they happened during the year. I can see already that solid story mapping is going to serve us well as our students take a fresh approach to each and every week of the year. Things could get dull on first gloss. Once we start peeling back the layers, though, story ideas rain from the skies.
Not much else does here in Phoenix.
-Mike Simons
West HS / East HS
Corning-Painted Post, NY
We, too, our doing a chronological book next year -- a weekly one with two spreads dedicated to each week of the year. We are doing away with our traditional sports section for the first time ever and instead coving them in the two-page modular packages. And for a school that just won it's sixth straight softball championship (currently ranked #1 in the country), we are going about this gingerly, warning the coaches ahead of time that we have a plan to make sure they are all being covered (possibly more than they would have been before at that). The theme is MOMENTOUS -- focusing on the moments of the year that make up the collective identity of the school (gonna focus on the words moment and us that are in the larger word). I think chronological books allow for some of the most journalistically sound work our students can do in the yearbook classroom. Sad I won't be seeing this book through the entire messy process.
ReplyDelete~Adrienne Forgette
Northern HS
Owings, MD