Personal insight from the meeting with state legislators

The news story from the informational rally was easy to write about. What is important to distinguish is the difference between an informational and persuasive meeting. Because even though his AB 656 bill is good for students, Torrico was trying to win the support of people. I noticed that not much time was given to students to ask questions. It was easy to conduct the interview with a teacher because all of the faculty members who came were interested in the topic, and they are also personally affected by the budget cuts. I had to put an extra effort into trying not to be subjective when I wrote my article, because I honestly think that this bill, as good as it may sound, has very little chance of passing because the oil companies have very strong lobbies in Congress and local governments and they are the once who influence legislation. This bill also comes a little too late and it's not going to change much when tuition has already gone up and many teachers have lost their jobs or gotten a pay cut. Another thing that was important to notice from the perspective of a reporter, was the fact that some of the teachers had an agenda. For example, a lady who teaches at SJSU, sat on our table and started talking right away, and shortly after gave us the support cards which she expected us to sign when we hadn't even gotten any information on the bill yet. So as a reporter, it is very important to be able to tell when people have an ulterior motive for talking to you.