The nature of an ideas meeting

The ideas meeting. This is essential to my placement for without in the most basic of ways I'd have no stories to cover.

What is done in a news outlet meeting is for staff to pitch ideas for stories to follow up or editors to assign each reporter a story. When pitching an idea their a two things you need to remember-

1. Ensure you clearly understand what you're trying to pitch. For example for my card game story (http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2010/12/lincoln-teens-frenzy-card-swapping-hobby/)  I wrote a note form script of what I was going and made sure I said 'I want to go to a card game tournament and speak to the participants'. Their have been instances in which I haven't properly prepared for a story pitch and the angle has thus come out as quite convoluted, for the student employment story my original angle was to look into the difficulty of employment and how fake job advertisements was adding to this problem, however due to a lack of preparation the idea may have come off as little formulaic and predictable (http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2011/03/students-struggle-for-jobs-in-lincoln/ ).

2. Have a little preparation done. Going back to my student employment story if I had looked at some statistics of how students were fairing for employment or even looked further into fake job adverts maybe I could have pitched it in a stronger manner. Preparation was extremely important for my Bishop story since the nature of the interview was different from what I was used to. Me and a collection of journalists were only given a short period of time with the Bishop, this meant I had to research into what the Bishop stood for and look for anything unique to ask (http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2011/11/new-bishop-of-lincoln-enthroned/ )

Focusing on the word I used in my last sentence 'unique' which in a more journalist like term means original stories. If I can I try to look for these stories since we live in a media saturated reality their tends to various instances of outlets covering the same stories. For example the Lincoln Christmas market-

http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2011/12/lincoln-christmas-market-ready-to-kick-off/ - The Lincolnite

http://www.thisislincolnshire.co.uk/Traders-gearing-return-Lincoln-Christmas-Market/story-13938469-detail/story.html The Lincolnshire Echo

The Lincolnshire Echo-

http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2011/12/lincoln-christmas-market-ready-to-kick-off/

Chris Frost believe the key for finding off diary stories is 'keeping your eyes open for unusual happenings.' This is how I found my Indian street art story as he simply caught my eye whilst I walked past him (http://thelincolnite.co.uk/2011/04/street-artist-brings-indian-art-to-lincoln/ )