NYU Class Offers Free Stories With Youth Appeal

By: Sonya Moore New York University's graduate student-powered Live Wire thinks it can feed the hunger that newspapers have for younger audiences while helping journalism students get their work published.

Live Wire offers on a weekly basis free stories written by largely young writers for young readers on its Web site. Though a specialized class for graduate students, the program runs like a news bureau. Students come in with story ideas that have to be approved and then edited before being uploaded on the Web site every Wednesday.

Almost three weeks old, Live Wire currently has a couple of stories available for download or to copy and paste straight from the site. Editors can also subscribe to have a weekly e-mail inform them of updates. Stories currently available include reports on hand-crocheted thongs, the hassle some New York City residents go through when their sidewalks are invaded by television crews from shows such as "Law & Order" or "Sex and the City," and activists discussing how to avoid getting arrested in preparation to protest the upcoming Republican National Convention.

Christy Slewinski, a specialty sections editor at the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel who subscribes to Live Wire, was especially interested in the option to offer story ideas and have students write them. So far, the responses to the pieces available remain varied. "A lot [of the stories] are very Manhattan-centric, which won't work for us," Slewinski admits, but she sees promise in some of the fashion and travel-oriented pieces -- having recently used a story about the resurrected club scene in Chelsea.

Some other journalism graduate schools, including those at Columbia University and Northwestern University, also offer student-written news wire services.

At NYU, Eileen Ogintz, a syndicated columnist of "Taking the Kids" and a journalism professor adjunct, had found herself consistently running into the same complaint from her graduate journalism students. "One of the biggest gripes was not getting clips," Ogintz says.

Mary Quigley, another journalism professor working with Live Wire, explains that she saw too many good stories get squirreled away in computers, never to see the light of day again. "They know a lot of cool stuff that's going on," Quigley says about the students. She observed a natural tendency to gravitate towards arts and entertainment and the ability to spot trends or ideas simply by being where the action is for young people in New York.

The concept isn't a new one. The first Live Wire circulated around seven years ago with the same idea of supplying free news stories to editors and clips for students. However, without widespread e-mail access and no Web site, the technological limitations of the day made it hard to get stories out to editors. "With the Web, it just makes it so easy," Ogintz says of the 2004 incarnation of Live Wire.

Quigley thinks the class encourages students to think of more publishable stories and write more professionally: "When you say a story is going to be published, it raises it to a whole different level." At the same time, it provides a "20-something New York spin" to news stories for papers that don't have staff in the city and would like to cater more to that age demographic. The only "payment" that Live Wire asks for is to be informed when the stories are used and to send a copy of it.

"I think it's incredible," says Mark Hazlin of his experience in the class. The 29-year-old grad student decided to enroll because he wanted to write and pitch news stories on his own, but knew of the difficulties for student writers. "If I went out and tried to pitch the same story as a freelancer, they might not even get a second look."

Linda O'Connell, assistant managing editor for features at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., says some of the stories are "very New York," but she's offered tips to the students on how to appeal to a larger market. "I think they've got great potential," O'Connell says of the program, and likes the fact that a lot of the story ideas are "fresh and creative."

"It's hard to please everybody, but we're doing the best we can," Quigley says. The articles also get filtered through the copy editing graduate class for an added assurance that they adhere to style.