Welcome to #MeetMadison, the latest all-staff collaborative project from Isthmus. This is a sort of hybrid, combining our desire to do the occasional group project, wherein the staff shares the effort to report on a single topic, and our occasional collaboration with UW journalism classes.
The object of this exercise was to investigate the nooks and crannies of our city and find out what various people do to contribute to the unspooling of daily life here. We used the person power of four sessions of the Intermediate Reporting class J 335, taught by UW faculty members Sue Robinson, Lucas Graves, Steve Walters and Robert Drechsel. The students were required to identify their subjects before spring break and complete the assignment in the two weeks after returning.
Each student had to submit one article for print and either a video or audio report. We're training our journalists these days to be multimedia adepts. The Isthmus staffers involved confined their reportage to print.
The results of all this community infiltration can be seen over four and a half pages of this issue, and in a more extensive version online at MeetMadison.isthmus.com.
Since this project is about what Madisonians of every stripe engage in, we've saved a spot for any of you who might want to be a part of it. You can introduce us to someone interesting using the hashtag #MeetMadison on Twitter or Instagram. It's amazing how easy it is these days to have a conversation with ourselves.
We're glad to help provide some real-world experience for these student journalists and glad to have their input for such an expansive project. It won't be long before these students reach the end of the school year and the beginning of their careers in many cases. For our staffers it's back to business as usual until the next group project in May.