Tutorial #11

In this week's lecture and tutorial, students presented their story pitches. These ranged from stories about animal abuse to the homosexual community. My own pitch was about American exchange students living on college and the change between life in America and life here in Australia.
A story pitch is not a story already written, but what a journalist does when they want a story to be published, they are selling the idea.
The journalist must take many things into account when pitching a story. The first of these is the outlet they wish to publish the story. I chose the outlet JCNN because the story I pitched is local to the university. I would not have chosen another outlet, such as the Townsville Bulletin, because the readers would be interested about stuff to do with the Townsville community rather than the university.
A major factor of the story is the format that it will take. Will it be a print news story? A television news story? Or, in my case, an online article?
Another aspect that has to be taken into account is the news values of the story. The news values are what draw the reader in, such as proximity, relevance, human interest, conflict and health. The news values of the story I pitched were proximity and relevance. These are appropriate because not only is the story close within the university, but students can relate to it.
Length is a big part of the pitch. This means the length of the story as well as how long it will take to complete it.
Every good story has images that can go with it. During the pitch, images should be identified and used that will compliment the story. For example, in my pitch I displayed images of America (taken by one of the American girls on my floor) that will help show the contrast between American and Australian life.
For a story to be professional, the information has to come from a reliable source. Without these sources, the reliability of the story will be questionable. The sources I got in contact with were the three American girls on my floor at Saint's Catholic College.
The story pitches were done well and there was a lot of potential for the stories to go further and actually be pitched to a news outlet.