1 Million Story Ideas & Writing Prompts for Student Journalists [Updated Regularly]

Over the past decade, digital tools and mobile platforms have rocketed journalism to a universe of innovation, interactivity and immediacy once unimaginable. Yet, without stellar content, journalism 2.0 is not worth the effort to read, watch, click on, scroll through, contribute to or connect with. Everything journalism was, is and will be rests on our ability to tell a story. And every story starts with an idea.

So let’s brainstorm. To help get you started, below is a quick-hit, unending, hopefully indispensable, fun, fun, fun digital story ideas fountain. It is aimed at inspiring student journalists to localize, adapt and reinvent a range of stories — quirky and mainstream, text-based and visual, interactive and investigatory. Many ideas come from your student press peers. Others originate with the professional press. And still others are pulled from independent journalists, viral videos and social media mavericks that catch my eye.

Along with providing a barebones blueprint and some links for specific stories and features, the larger goal is one also found in my book Journalism of Ideas: Brainstorming, Developing, and Selling Stories in the Digital Age. I want to ensure j-students the world over have the confidence to come across any person, place, thing, event, trend, viewpoint, document, law, word or even a single letter and respond with an idea — a good one, a newsworthy one, one worth reporting.

I will update the list in (somewhat) real-time, as cool ideas cross my path. I’ll add to the top, so fresh ideas will always be the first thing you see. I picked 1 million as a nice round target number because it is insanely large but more concrete than “a gazillion” or “endless.” If I ever actually reach 1 million, I’ll throw a party.

Have an idea for the list? Email or tweet at me ASAP.

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New Ideas Added at the Top

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A Social Media Aggregated Page. During a presentation this summer, digital media guru Sree Sreenivasan declared, “I’m shocked how few institutions have a social media aggregated page where you can see everything” — meaning an all-in-one hub showing off the institution’s general Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, Google+ and LinkedIn accounts AND providing a directory of the social media accounts of other things and people connected to the institution. So, for a college or university, that might include spotlights and links to the social media of specific departments, centers, programs and major influencers such as administrators, professors, prominent alumni and even student leaders. Sreenivasan said the best example of such a page, at least within higher ed, is at Harvard University. Does your school have a social media aggregated page run by its communications team? If not, start one at your news outlet — in your case not to glorify the school but simply to make it easier for people to see what all parts of it are up to on social media at any given moment.