Story Idea Friday

Often on Friday's I like to recommend a story idea or two that student journalists at UGA should pursue. I'm not saying they'll end up being good stories. You don't know until you sniff around, ask a few questions, read a report or two. So here's my idea for the day from the monthly EITS (our computer folks) report:

Housing Residents Give Feedback about Wireless Service: Based on student feedback, EITS recently conducted a survey of residents in University Housing about PAWS-Secure wireless service. The survey focused on specific residence halls with wireless issues and times of service degradation. Of the 8,000 residents in University Housing, about 40 percent completed the survey. EITS and University Housing will soon determine the next steps to quickly address gaps in wireless service for the residence halls. For more information about the survey, please contact Kerri Testement at kerriuga@uga.edu.

How about that. We have a survey, we have a topic students care about (Wifi), and we hav a friggin contact person.

Make sure, on the survey, you get the questionnaire and the raw data. If they fudge because there's "identifying information" in the survey (there shouldn't be), ask them to strip all identifying info and give you the raw data either as a spreadsheet or ASCII test, and then pull it into the appropriate program. Also ask for any reports they've generated from the data, such as an executive summary.

There's a story there. I promise.