Find new angles to the back-to-school story

Stephanie Irwin was tipped off while participating in a conference call. Jenn Abelson saw sweaters for sale at the mall in July. Jennifer Vogelsong talked to some colleagues.

These newspaper reporters were looking for fresh business angles to the traditional back-to-school story, a staple of daily local papers in August and early September. Their success with recent pieces demonstrates their belief that drive, thoroughness and the initiative to look outside the office is all a reporter needs to find a new angle to this annual story.

Irwin, who covers retail and small business for the Dayton Daily News, was speaking with a retailer during a conference call in early July when she heard that the retailer had already begun stacking back-to-school products, such as denim, in its juniors department. Several weeks still remained before schools would return to session.

Working off that tip, Irwin visited the retailer's local store and others and called trade groups and individual retailers. She also checked prices of popular back-to-school items to compile a mock-shopping experience for the average parent. And she followed one woman around a local Wal-Mart for 90 minutes while she shopped.

In her resulting story, "Back-to-school season can't begin early enough," Irwin explained how retailers were launching the season earlier because of a slow spring season and their desire to get families to return to buy more shortly after school starts.

She also added a sidebar on the frustration and stress parents feel during back-to-school shopping, which she gleaned from her time in Wal-Mart.

Abelson, a business reporter for the Boston Globe, wrote a similar piece in late July. She got the idea for "School Bell Rings Earlier For Stores: Back-To-School Shopping Starts in July" when she saw sweaters for sale at a local mall in early July -- just a few weeks after the previous school year had ended.

"It just seemed early," Abelson wrote in an e-mail interview.

Abelson also asked about back-to-school issues during a Question-and-Answer session with a Staples executive. This provided an original angle to the back-to-school story: A piece on discounts for teachers, who often buy a lot of their own supplies for teaching lessons.

It was important for her to write something unique, Abelson said, because "nobody wants to read the same story every year."

Vogelsong, a general assignment features writer for the York Daily Record, agrees. So do her editors, who expected her to come up with a creative take on the story.

"If we were just to do a regular run of the mill story," Vogelsong said, "I don't know how that would go over."

So at a staff meeting Vogelsong hatched an idea to follow a family around the mall during its shopping spree. She sent a mass e-mail out to the newsroom and a colleague put her in touch with the Finnegan family.

To report her piece, "Family gets a lesson in … Back-to-school shopping," Vogelsong followed the Finnegans, a woman and her three daughters, through the York Galleria for about five hours. She had to constantly be on her toes, deciding whom to stay with when the family split up and trying to stay out of a staff photographer's way while she attempted to hear the small talk between the girls.

"I like to do stories where I can go out there and try to capture that experience," Vogelson said.

She took a different approach for another back-to-school story, "A guide to help college students decide what to bring to campus." For this piece, Vogelsong interviewed current students and experts, and researched the average size of nearby college dorm rooms.

"I remember my freshman dorm room and I don't know where I would have put all this stuff" that some students were considering bringing, she said. "So our thought was: 'What do you really need?'"

To determine that, she got out of the office and put in a little more work than the average reporter may be willing to do for a back-to-school story. If you're looking for a new angle to this staid story, that approach is almost essential.

"Trying to find a twist on these seasonal stories, the easiest way is to get out into the stores and observe," Irwin said. "Usually these stories are a bit of a drag and everybody tries to find a fresh angle. When you do find one, spend time flushing it out. It'll be worth it."

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism