Deployed spouse photo story...

I've been trying to track down a family that has one parent deployed in either Iraq or Afghanistan. The idea is to show how the war is affecting family life stateside which is a story I haven't seen done thoroughly yet. A couple of years ago I found a woman who was trying to juggle her career and three kids while her husband was in Iraq for his second tour. One kid had ADHD and was on the verge of being kicked out of middle school and the mom was on the verge of losing her job because her son kept getting sent home from school. She became completely overwhelmed and she ended up moving out of the state to be near family, so the story got killed. If you know of someone who is having a difficult time holding down the fort while their spouse is deployed please let me know. I've been working with various organizations in hopes of finding a subject, but no one's come through.

Where do people get their information from ...

We live in a society overloaded with information. It still amazes me that people still get their facts wrong despite all of the sources available to get reliable information. For example, on Christmas Day, my mother-in-law flatly stated that Barack Obama is a Muslim. A quick Google search provided me with several sources that Obama is a Christian who attends Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's Southside. Where did my mother-in-law get her information - a friend. This might make for a good chunky text story made up of statistical information of where people get their information from.

Welcome

Hi everyone and welcome to The FLS Idea Farm blog. The purpose of this blog is to provide another avenue for sharing ideas across the newsroom and departments.

This is a blog where everyone in the newsroom can post. This is where you can throw out some stream of consciousness thinking. Or, you can announce that you want to work on an idea, but you're looking for input to get you started. Feel free to also share ideas for stories/pictures/projects/multimedia that you would like to see, but don't necessarily have the ability, time, desire, etc. to work on.

Hopefully, this blog can lead to better content for our readers and some inspirational work for us that goes beyond our daily grind.

Dave Ellis