Now Seeking Next Generation of Reporters
Are you a high school student? Do you live in or near the city of Dallas? Do you ask good questions (better questions than these, for example)? What kind of questions, you ask? (Great follow up.)
Have you ever wondered why your high school has a better marching band than the high school across town? Have you ever wanted to ask your principal what they do all day? Have you ever wanted to ask the mayor what his stance is on refugees? Or what the story is about the restaurant down the street from your house? Or maybe, probably, you have better questions than any of these.
For the past few years, students in the Storytellers Without Borders program, a collaboration between the Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Public Library, have spent eight weeks learning how to turn those questions into stories.
Every Wednesday night from 6–7:30 p.m. at the downtown library students in the program learn from writers, editors, columnists, librarians and city officials about reporting, writing, media literacy, research and more, with the goal of producing one full-length, professional-quality, reported story. We have a press conference with a city official (it’s been the chief of police, a city councilman, and even the mayor!). And the final week there’s a pizza party at the Dallas Morning News offices with the paper’s editor, Mike Wilson (who, appropriately, owns a dog named Story) .
Each student is assigned a journalist mentor, a professional reporter, who spends time with them throughout the eight weeks to help develop and report the story. Some of the stories from our Storytellers have even been published in the Dallas Morning News.
It’s a whirlwind eight weeks that asks high schoolers to think like journalists and work like journalists. And we know high schoolers are busy, but look, it’s just 90 minutes for eight weeks and a little legwork outside the sessions. You might end up with a mentor for life, but at the very least, you’ll end up with a story.
Fall dates are Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2019 through November 13, 2019. Application is open to anyone in grades 9–12 who lives in (or near) the city of Dallas. The deadline to apply is midnight, Friday, Sept., 13, 2019.
Storytellers Without Borders is generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and supported by the Friends of the Dallas Public Library.
