Book Review: Journalism of Ideas: Brainstorming, Developing, and Selling Stories in the Digital Age, by Daniel Reimold

Abstract

Daniel Reimold Journalism of Ideas: Brainstorming, Developing, and Selling Stories in the Age. New York: Routledge, 2013. 367 pp.Daniel Reimold's book is not your typical textbook for teaching journalism. Reimold recognized that when he states on his blog, http://collegemediamatters.com (November 13, 2013), that he is compiling a list. He hopes to gather on his blog a million story ideas (. .fun digital story ideas fountain) from professionals and others to inspire student journalists. His goal, specifically, is . to localize, adapt and reinvent a range of stories-quirky and mainstream, text-based and visual, interactive and investiga- tory, and to provide a barebones blueprint for writing them.This, he says, is also the goal of his book. The blog story ideas fountain will keep the generation of story ideas fresh and up to date.Reimold is an assistant professor of journalism and a student newspaper advisor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. In addition, he is the Beat columnist for USA Today College and a contributor for Poynter, PBS MediaShift, and The Huffington Post. He is the author of the book Sex and the University: Celebrity, Controversy, and a Student Journalism Revolution published in 2010 by Rutgers University Press.Journalism of Ideas is a valuable guidebook for college-level student journalists. It is packed full of quotations, anecdotes, and words of wisdom that a student might receive from a sage advisor or mentor. The reader of this book, however, can through this one source tap into hundreds of perspectives and pieces of advice from journalism profession- als, educators, college student peers, and others. Readers are assumed to be college stu- dents involved in campus publications. A student journalist could certainly benefit from this practical book for generating story ideas and for apprenticeship-like support.From a teaching perspective, instructors who teach beginning-level reporting classes or courses for preparing high school and college-level publication advisors will find this book to be useful for teaching basic reporting, as well as journalism 2.0 tech- niques. Chapters 1 and 2 set the stage for the remainder of the book by defining the role of the journalist as storyteller and defining the story. According to Reimold, a WOW story possesses all or most of the following buzzwords- Innovative, Impacting, Accurate, Timely, Interesting, Fresh, Objective, Informative, and Concrete (p. 6). Nearly all of the twenty chapters of Journalism of Ideas follow the same format that includes teaching aids, such as Assignment Alerts (i.e. suggested assignments) and Ideas, Online (i.e. online exercises). Throughout the book, the author shares Internet links to online information and websites. The chapter headings are indicative of the content within each, such as Location, Data Journalism, Building a Beat, and Digital and Mobile Story Mining. …