Illinois Capitol Building in Springfield. Image via Wikipedia

This week, I’m preparing for a trip to Springfield—Illinois’s lovely capital—with my Reporting Public Affairs State/National colleagues! Well, I hope it’s lovely. Despite having lived in Illinois for most of my life, I’ve never been there before.

The trip will help us develop contacts and witness legislators in action as we work on covering our beats this semester.

I really like covering a beat, as opposed to working on more generally assigned stories last semester. This term, we wrote pitch memos to our professors to vie for the beats we wanted to cover. We’re covering many facets of state and national government this semester, everything from utilities to gaming, crime reporting, and transportation.

I’ve got the higher education beat this term and have been enjoying it so far. To be honest, reporting isn’t my most favorite part of journalism—I’m actually pretty shy around new people as I discussed in a previous post.  But covering a beat circumvents some of that shyness.

When you cover a beat, you start to cultivate a rich pool of resources and contacts. You accumulate a lot of background knowledge in your field and learn to ask the relevant questions.  There’s a lot of relationship building with sources.

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Covering a beat was a little intimidating at first, since you’re necessarily going deeper on your assignments than you would in, say, a day-of story where you’re covering a press conference or an event.

But the challenges are much more to my liking, and I’ve been learning some things about ways to gain a deeper background on a beat.

I chose higher education in part because all of my post-secondary education has been at Illinois schools. This means that I can draw on not only my familiarity with the regulations and memories of previous higher education stories, but that I also have access to sources who have attended, are currently attending or teach at Illinois colleges and universities.

Secondly, I’ve started reading as much higher ed news as possible. It’s amazing the amount of higher ed coverage you notice in the news when you’re paying attention. I’ve also started following state agencies like the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Illinois Student Assistance Commission, as well as news outlets like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Both the Chronicle and IHE have useful, free daily newsletters– they’ve been very helpful for coming up with story ideas.

Also, it’s been helpful to learn the field through my sources, who will sometimes stray down informative tangents in interviews.

So, all in all, I’m excited to be boarding a train and heading out to our state capital. If you would like to follow our adventures on Twitter, I’m @Stephanie_Ewing and our class will be tweeting on #CCCTrip.  Hope you can join us!