On story safari... Bag a big one.

I remember getting my first reporting assignment way back in J301: Write a 500-word story about "someone on campus."

Wow! It was like a real, actual assignment. My dreams of high profile reporting seemed six inches closer.

I remember struggling most with finding someone worthy to write about. It seemed like I always had story ideas in my head, interesting people to write about, but under-pressure those ideas vanished.

Two semesters passed. J301 became J415 and J415 became J692. My inexperience no longer interfered with my reporting ability.

But one thing never got easy: knowing who or what to report on.

Now that J692 has become J693, I see a lot of "Story Idea Proposal" forms. And I've learned that I'm not alone in struggling to find a decent story.

The hardest part of the reporting process remains finding something to report on.

Which got me wondering: What if we built a user-generated story idea generator on tv.ku.edu? It would have to have a cute name, like "Brainstorm."

How would it work? Imagine a web-based story proposal form: Headline, synopsis, "who cares?", and a contact relevant to the story.

Imagine collecting those story ideas on one site with commands to organize the stories – a la Digg. The better story ideas rise to the top, offering our young reporters a place to brainstorm new ideas for stories. That's one possibility.

Perhaps in the short-term we simply make KUJH TV a Facebook profile and keep updating our status to "KUJH TV is looking for story ideas: Can you help?" And see what we get on our wall.

Perhaps such a system would hinder the ability of our reporters to come up with good ideas on their own.

But then again, there's nothing inspiring like seeing good stories in action.

And, though I hate to say it, how much worse can we get?