How can my project be appealing to the media?

One of the biggest goals of my project is to grab the attention of the media. Our teacher has told us that she is going to get a panel of judges and media to come view our projects once we have finished collecting and analyzing the data.

To appeal to the media I must first ask myself: What are the media looking for? Usually people involved with media are only interested in, well… interesting stories. They want something that they can wow people with or that they can quickly grab the attention of people with. The material they use must also be relevant to what is going on in today’s world and be tied to the lives of people in some way. No one is going to be interested in something that does not directly relate to them or affect them.

The topic of my project, the opinion of New Orleans’ citizens on the bailout plan, is something that many people are interested in. It is very much relevant to today’s world and is something that affects all Americans. The way I can make this appealing topic even more appealing is by presenting the data in an interesting way. In a way the graphs and data analysis methods used to describe the data can make the data more appealing. For example, a confidence interval of my sample could help me predict how the population of New Orleans felt as a whole about this stimulus package. A lot of people don’t know about certain statistical analysis methods and graphs, so the graphs and analysis should be presented in a way where the people can easily understand it. Ultimately a strong choice of words would both appeal to and inform the individuals very well. For my project I hope to attract the attention of the Times Picayune newspaper. I feel that if they publish my info in their newspaper then it will catch the eyes of thousands of people.

Here are two websites that show and describe some statistical methods I will use:

http://www.isixsigma.com/library/content/c010527c.asp

http://www.netmba.com/statistics/plot/box/