The pitch
Your first deliverable will be a “pitch.” This should include the following elements:
- venue/audience Would this be for a print or electronic venue? Who are the readers? Smith students? People in Northampton? Readers of the New York Times?
- number of stories Are you going to write one longform piece of journalism, or several shorter pieces that hang together? Will some of the pieces be data visualization?
- rollout If you’re writing multiple pieces, do you imagine them being published in the same issue, or rolling out over the course of time? Over days, weeks, months?
- headline(s) Write me a first draft of your headline(s)
- byline(s) Who will be writing the story/stories? Will everyone by on every byline, or are you writing separate pieces and helping each other edit?
- lede and nutgraph What’s the overall hook for your story/stories?
- data source Where are you getting the data for your story?
- observations and variables What is each observation in your dataset? A student? A year? What are the variables you have information on for each of those observations? Whether or not they graduate? Overall graduation rate? etc
Word length requirements
If you are working in a group, you need to produce fewer written words, because I assume you will be doing work in other ways. For example, you will also be helping your peers with editing. So, the word length requirements are different based on the size of the group:
- One person: at least 1000 words
- Two people: at least 1800 words
- Three people: at least 2440 words
- Four people: at least 2952 words
- Five people: at least 3362 words
- Six people: at least 3690 words
Groups of one or two people can substitute up to 500 words for data visualizations. Groups of three or more can substitute up to 1000 words for data visualizations.
Use your judgement about substitutions. If it is a very simple visualization that supports a written piece (like a barchart), maybe that only “counts” for 100 words. If it’s a data visualization that forms the bulk of the storytelling, it could substitute for 500 words.
Exceptions
These word counts and substitutions are rules of thumb. Please talk to me if you have a different concept. Maybe you want to do a timeline as your entire piece, we can talk about the requirements there.