Your Stories: A Reminder

Please keep in mind all reporting on our stories must be ORIGINAL reporting. That means we don't cite articles from other media (according to CNN; The New York Times reported ... ) or other things we found online (MSU's Web site said; according to Wikipedia ... ). Instead, we talk to researchers and participants and people in charge of the issue directly ourselves, and we look at studies and research papers and documents directly ourselves.

So, if you're doing a story about the proposed U.S.-North Korea summit, you should NOT cite reporting from CNN and The New York Times; you should reach out to a political science prof who is expert on the issue and interview him or her; you should try to get a hold of government officials or in lieu of that, get press releases directly from their Web sites, and so on.

That's the difference between doing a term paper and a new story: for a term paper we cite the work of others, but for a news story we do the work ourselves.

Now, how do we find people to talk to? One way is to look at news stories done by others. See who they interviewed and what documents they cited, and then try to get a hold of those people directly yourself and get those documents yourself for your own review.

No matter how we do this, the heart of journalism is doing interviews directly with people involved in your issue. We need to make sure we are doing that.