Copyright Goodheart-Willcox Co., Inc. Chapter Two News Values and Story Ideas 43 county announces changes in its work permit policy. If he discovers the networking problem at a local church was caused by mice nesting in the server, you can add the element of oddity. How will the tone of the story change if you emphasize the oddity of the story? Would you use a pun on the two meanings of mouse? Mention church mice? A word of caution: If you cannot identify one or more strong news values in your story, consider carefully whether the story idea is a good one. Meet the Professionals: Bill Plaschke “Only in journalism can our words mean so much. Only in journalism can we use those words to change the world,” Bill Plaschke told 3,000 student journalists at a Journalism Education Association convention. Bill Plaschke, a sports columnist at the Los Angeles Times since 1996 and a regular panelist on the ESPN daily talk show “Around the Horn,” has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and chosen as the Associated Press’s National Sports Columnist of the Year three times. He has authored five books. Plaschke says journalism is “one of the toughest businesses in the world, but one of the coolest businesses in the world, a business that still makes millions of dollars and reaches zillions of people.” Here’s Bill talking about how he got started in journalism: “Growing up in Louisville, Ky., I went from a tiny Catholic grade school to this giant public high school called Ballard. My parents weren’t rich, I didn’t know anybody, and I stuttered. My first three months, every day I would run home after school and sleep for two hours, I was so scared and depressed. “I was sure of only two things in the entire world. I loved to write, and I loved sports. But what good was that? I didn’t figure it out until one day at a basketball game, I noticed everyone in the stands chanting for the worst guy on the team to play. His name was Earl. ‘We Want Earl!’ Well, Earl was one of my first friends, one of the only people at school who would talk to me. I thought, ‘This is fascinating, people cheering for the worst guy on the team, what was that like?’ So I asked him. And then I wrote a story about it and turned it in to the school newspaper. “And here came that miracle. Two days later, people were holding the paper and pointing at me as I walked the halls. Teachers were patting my back. Even the jocks were suddenly talking to me. And I realized this was not because of my background or athletic skill or coolness. I couldn’t even talk without stuttering, remember? This was all because of my words. I thought, I can have this much effect on my world with just words? Wow. “My words brought me through another tough situation, at my college, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. It was, at the time, a small school with few facilities. I went there because we had just moved to Illinois and it was cheap. I lived in a church basement. I had no money, no connections, I had only my words. “We had no gym at school, no football team and a basketball team that played in a local high school. Besides soccer, we didn’t really have any big-time sports. So I didn’t write about games. I wrote about people. The school’s only competitive pool player, doing his homework in smoky taverns. The school’s long-distance runner, trying to qualify for a marathon by running through cow pastures. I didn’t write stars, because we had no stars. I wrote humans. That’s how I learned of the simple power in their stories. That’s why I still do that today.” Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times