Reporting Your Topic

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Choosing a Topic

As a work-study, you'll either be given story assignments by your supervisor or you'll be given the freedom to write about any topic you want. Either way, there are three questions you'll have to consider when choosing a topic:

Is my topic newsworthy?
Am I answering the 5 Ws and H?
Am I communicating my college's unique value proposition?

Each of these considerations are equally important in capturing the attention of prospective students. First, we'll take a look at what it means to be newsworthy.

Newsworthiness

Whether you're reporting on a campus event, a new major, or profiling a faculty member, your topic needs to be newsworthy. Essentially, a story is newsworthy if it's interesting, relevant, or unusual. If you're not sure if your topic is newsworthy, ask yourself whether your topic has any of these elements:

Timeliness: Is your story recent? Does it cover a trending topic?
Proximity: Does the story happen on campus? Near your college?
Relevance: Are a lot of people impacted by this story? Is it something that directly impacts students? Does it feature prominent people or places?
Novelty: Is your story about something unusual or unexpected?
Emotion: Will your story make the reader feel something?

As an HEPR news writer, you need to think about these elements from the perspective of prospective students.

Answering the 5 Ws and 1 H

Determining newsworthiness will help you decide why your topic is worth writing about, but you will still need to figure out how you're going to write it. When gathering information for your story, there are six questions that prospective students will want answers to:

Who?: Which people are central to the story? Which people does this story directly impact? Prospective students, current students, faculty, administration, alumni, guest speakers, or others?
What?: Either an action or an item, the what is the central topic of your story. Is it a campus event, a new program being created, renovations to a building, etc.?
When?: How long ago did your story happen, or when will it happen?
Where?: Did your story happen on campus? Was it on the green, in the library, or in a specific classroom?
Why?: What reason did your story happen? What caused it to occur?
How?: What was the process by which the story occurred?

The better you communicate the answers to these questions, the better your readers will understand why your story is newsworthy.

As a public relations writer, your goal is not just to inform prospective students on the 5 Ws and 1 H, but to convince them as to why your topic is a reason to apply to the college. To accomplish this, your topic should communicate the unique value proposition of your institution.

Unique Value Proposition

The unique value proposition is the idea that your college provides benefits to its students that are better than what other colleges are offering. For example, if your institution is in New York City and wants to promote its television production major, its unique value proposition appears through its proximity to the film and TV industry. Prospective students should apply to your college because they can gain internships in one of the media capitals of the world. Not all colleges can say that!

Now that you understand how to determine if your story is newsworthy and how to answer the readers' questions, you can use these elements of the feature story to show why your college sticks out from the rest.

Knowing what questions to answer is only half of the reporting process, however. Next, we'll take a look at how you find these answers.

Researching a Topic

There are two types of sources you should find when researching your topic: primary sources and supplementary information. A primary source is a person who directly gives you information, and supplementary information can be a document, webpage, or other non-human sources that adds supporting detail to your story.

There are a couple of different ways to find both types of sources. Primary sources give information through interviews which can be conducted in-person, over the phone or video chat, or through email. They can also be contacted through social media, which is a form of internet research. First, we'll cover how to interview the various types of college stakeholders.

Interviewing

Although the purpose of HEPR is to engage prospective students, you won't always be speaking to them directly. To flesh out your feature story with quotes and information, you'll have to interview the following audiences for different types of information:

Students

Current students are ideal for topics that seek to capture student perspectives. This is especially helpful when covering campus events, student-run organizations, internships, and for collecting student opinions. Students are also the most relatable audience for prospective students.

Faculty

Faculty can act as experts in their fields/industries, providing credible insight on topics that the general public cannot.

Staff

Non-faculty employees such as administrators and executives are useful sources of information on institution-wide initiatives and non-program-related news regarding admissions, facilities, information technology, and more.

Alumni

If your topic covers career aspects and post-graduation life, alumni are great sources to pull from. As a PR writer, engaging with alumni is a good example of how your college can build a mutually beneficial relationship with an audience.

Other

Sometimes, a source won't be a traditional institutional stakeholder. For example, if a student club volunteers to help the surrounding community, it could be helpful to hear from local groups and officials.

The most common way to reach these stakeholders is through your institutional email. Students, faculty, and staff can be found within your college's email database, but you'll have to find the contact information for alumni and other sources through web research and asking your colleagues.

Web Research

There are two ways to find information on the web: search engines and social media. Both are useful in finding primary sources and supplementary information.

Search Engines

As a work-study, there are two search engines that will be useful to you: Google, and the search bar on your college's website. Both are fast and easy ways to find information, but Google will scan and collect links from the entire internet while your institutional search bar will only collect information available on institutional webpages. Google is especially helpful for finding supplementary information such as statistics, and institutional search engines are better for finding specific programs, offices, departments, and individuals associated with your college.

While it may seem simple and straight to the point, there are actually a few ways to get the best results most relevant to your feature story topic. Your search query, which is the specific words in a specific order you put into a search engine, should do the following:

Use nouns: Nouns are more likely to be keywords in headlines than adjectives and verbs, so they are more likely to find a webpage you're looking for.
Be as specific as possible: Are you doing a story about all students, or can you be more specific? Try searching "sophomore" or "senior" to specify by year.
Use quotation marks: Placing your search query in quotation marks will
Use logical operators: Logical operators, namely AND, OR, and NOT, are conjunctions that connect the words in your search query so that the search engine will pull certain results.

For example, if you're doing a story on successful graduates of the biology or chemistry programs, but you want to exclude environmental science, you should consider using the following search query:

"biology major" OR "chemistry major" AND "alumni" NOT "environmental science major"

Note that on Google, you'll have to include the name of your college in your search query when looking for alumni or information specific to your institution. You can also use Google Alerts to get email notifications whenever your college is mentioned in the news or on external webpages.

Social Media

Social media is not only a great tool for sharing and publicizing your story, but it can be helpful in collecting the background information that makes up your story as well. As a young, digital audience, both prospective students and current students spend a lot of their time on social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Although each differs slightly in purpose and user behavior, they're all great ways to connect with your readers.

Crowdsourcing

As a reporting tool, your institution's official social media accounts can be used for crowdsourcing, which is gathering both sources and content from online users.

As described in the Interviewing section, sources such as students, faculty, and staff provide quotes and information via interviews. If you're looking for opinions from current students on your college's football team after a big win (or loss), you can post to Twitter asking for student reactions.

Social media sources can also provide multimedia elements such as photos and videos that can be used in your feature story. Multimedia provided by readers is known as user-generated content (UGC). UGC is especially helpful when you can't attend an event you're covering, such as study abroad trips. Posting to your institutional social media channels asking for submissions of photos and videos is a great way to save time, tell your story with visuals, and to engage your readers.

Note that although comments are public-facing information, it's a best practice to ask for permission before using them as quotes in your story. Quotes and UGC provided within direct messages require permission before use to avoid plagiarism and malpractice.

Summary

Just as there are a couple of "steps" to writing an online HEPR feature story that can be done in any order, the same could be said for reporting your topic. You can start with an idea from a comment on social media, see something in the news that relates to your school, hear an interesting story from a classmate, or come up with a topic on your own. Any way you start, you'll have to justify your topic's newsworthiness and answer the 5 Ws and 1 H. Through interviews, search engines, and crowdsourcing, you'll answer these questions and show why prospective students should consider your college when applying.

Now that you've learned how to report your topic, read on to learn more about how to tell your story with visuals, engage prospective students, and attribute borrowed content.

References and Further Reading

Hill, S., & Lashmar, P. (2013). Online journalism: The essential guide. SAGE Publications, Inc.

Major, M. (2020, May 18). How to craft a value proposition for your school (with examples).

Finalsite. https://www.finalsite.com/blog/p/~board/b/post/how-to-craft-a-value-proposition-for-your-school-with-example

Thornburg, R. (2010). Producing online news: Digital skills, stronger stories. CQ Press.