Early in 2009 I was approached by CBC to collaborate as the project lead for their Student News Day project. 

 

Over the course of six weeks, nine students from Fort Qu'Appelle's Bert Fox high school participated in the "Student News Day" project. Throughout this period the students attended workshops on storytelling, creating a pitch, writing for different media, interviewing techniques, recording sounds, shooting video, editing, and on-line storytelling at the IMP Labs.

 

Prior to the start of the project, students were asked to pitch a story that had a connection to their community as part of the application process. From these pitches a number of stories were developed. The overall goals of the project were for the students to create two news stories for television, two news stories for radio, an interactive blog, and two stories for additional on-line formats (YouTube, Facebook, etc.). The news stories aired in mid-March, while the on-line media formats were launched throughout the six weeks at different stages.

 

As part of the project, each student learned how to workshop a story, capture footage, interview participants, write a script, edit audio and video footage to create balanced news stories, and made some killer beats on the MPCs in the IMP Labs.