A good chunk of my new job is supposed to be generating story ideas. And, just between you, me, and the people who get here by googling "Norwegian clothing," I don't think I'm very good at generating story ideas. This week, though, I made my first attempt at proposing stories and had a total story idea triumph: I submitted two ideas I thought were good and one I thought was marginal to lame, and they loved the good ideas and rejected the other one. Yay.
Both the good ideas came from people I know - one was from something sent to a Norwegian dance listserv (random, I know - maybe I'll run a contest in six months or so for you to guess which story it was) and the other was a comment a scientist friend dropped at dinner on Sunday. For as long as I've been doing this journalism thing, I've tried to find ideas by reading, but, really, the good stuff comes from people who know me. I used to feel bad about this, but then an older and wiser journalist told me this was a really good way to get story ideas, and I felt better.
So, the solicitation: if you hear about anything and think, "Oh my god, that sounds like something I could read in the front pages of [towwas's employer]," shoot me an e-mail! Nine times out of 10, you'll be wrong (a lot of the time, I'm wrong), but hey, give it a try! Bonus points if you also think, "That sounds like something towwas would think was funny!" because that's the stuff I really like to write about.
Hm...I wonder if they'd go for a story on high-end denim?
4 comments:
Food miles - carbon load of Strawberries grown in Chile -- maps , graphs, great photos of miles and miles of fruit pinned up against the mountains...trucks hauling the berries to market and port, ships, trains, smog, smoke, soot, then from field to fork on a 4th of July shortcake with loads of whipped cream and a cherry cheeked midwestern girl eating the thing....I could go on....
Maybe not high-end denim in general, but did you know that historically, the best cotton for denim comes from Zimbabwe? Thanks to the Mugabe regime's domestic policies, however, there's a growing trend among Japanese companies to use denim they consider lesser quality?
In a separate denim-related issue, there's a growing eco trend - even Levi's recently jumped on the organic-cotton bandwagon (the pocket tabs are white with green "LeVI'S" stitching).
E-mail me for more links - I'll even co-author the piece. Superfuture would go insane.
oops, double oops, almost a blog faux pas! Anyway, story already taken by a fine publication and a major public entity -- so...good luck with that. But, seriouisly, doing it from London, how un-xxxx can you get?
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