For this project, you will create two items:

1.A main story (800 to 1,000 words, including at least two hyperlinks)

2.A sidebar (400 to 500 words, including at least two hyperlinks)

The topic can be local, state, national or international — but you must talk to people who can provide authoritative information, so be sure to pick a topic for which such sources will be available. Talk to as many sources as are necessary to give you two complete, fair and balanced stories — probably six or more sources for your main story and three or more sources for your sidebar.

Your hypothetical audience for the whole project is the students who read the Tropolitan.

You could have a main story about an issue or a situation and a human-interest sidebar, in which you focus on a particular person or a small group of people deeply affected by the main story. Or the people might be your main story, with the sidebar describing the general situation. (As you collect information, you may find that what you intended to be the sidebar would be better as the main story. That's usually OK. Just get the professor’s approval.)

Previous successful ideas include:

_Financial aid — how to get it, and one student's triumph over the system

_Credit cards — why so many solicitations, and one student’s struggle with debt

_Parking — why university officials say you need to just stop whining and walk that hundred yards, and how one student found the rules expensive to ignore.

I want to write about environmental protection, such as college students' views on environmental protection, the impact of global warming, and how to protect the environment from small things, such as using non-disposable straws.