Proposal for your paper, identifying which story/series/podcast/documentary you wish to examine, what impact you think it had or might have had, and how you will go about determining how the journalist’s or journalists’ work affected citizens in his/her/their coverage area

This assignment is for you to submit a 1- to 2-page proposal for your paper, identifying which story/series/podcast/documentary you wish to examine, what impact you think it had or might have had, and how you will go about determining how the journalist’s or journalists’ work affected citizens in his/her/their coverage area. (These might include impacts on government policy, impacts on business policy, impacts on community engagement and organization, etc.) The proposal will help us to see whether you understand the requirements of the project so that we can offer advice about assessing its impact.

Your proposal must include the following:

1. A 1- or 2-paragraph summary of the story you’ve chosen, including your identification of the specific problematic policies or practices the story describes.
2. A list of the individuals, government agencies or bodies (e.g. state health department or education department, city council, school board, state legislature) or other organization (a corporation or not-for-profit business) who/that would have some ability to address the issue at a policy level. In other words, who could change the structures or policies that cause or contribute to this problem? Many of these individuals or government entities will have been mentioned in the original story, but others might not have been. It’s OK to include people or organizations/agencies not mentioned in the original story, but please state what action you think that person/agency/organization could take that would change the structures or policies. So, for instance, if the story described a problem with the schools, some parents could obviously choose to move their children out of that school district, but that wouldn’t solve the overall problem. Or if the problem involves abusive or incompetent doctors, patients could try to do enough research to enable them to avoid these doctors, but that would not keep these doctors from continuing to practice. The point here is to get you to begin thinking about who could alter the situation in ways that would help/protect people who never read or heard about the story.
3. A description of at least three specific steps you plan to take to try to determine what impact, if any, the story had and, if no change has occurred, what prevented change from occurring. These steps could include reaching out to specific individuals (e.g. policy-makers, advocacy group representatives) likely to be familiar with the story, checking for follow-up coverage of the issue in the original news source and/or other news sources covering the same geographic or issue area, checking for government documents relevant to the original story, etc.  (Hint — you could actually do some of these things before you write the proposal.)