by Sheila Jones, JEA Mentor, Colorado Student reporters learn several important lessons when they enter a journalism classroom. One of the first is how to ask good questions. This definitely proved true for my JEA mentee Hannah Shapiro’s eight-person crew of broadcast journalists at Eagle Valley High School during Election  Week 2016. That’s when they took on a First Amendment debate brewing in Eagle County, Colorado, home to Vail and their bedroom community of Gypsum. Asking the question was the easy part of the lesson they learned in preparing an episode that would air two days after the election. The more challenging lesson would come later in what to do once they knew the answer. On Monday second year teacher and adviser Hannah Shapiro encouraged her students to include a current event story for the Thursday episode. No one mentioned the election. She then asked about what was happening in Eagle County or what the local newspaper, the Vail Daily, was covering.  And that was when the story of Luis Juarez and the Trump campaign sign destruction came up. A week before the election Colorado Mountain College student Luis Juarez had cut up some Trump campaign signs on the college … Continue reading Mentee’s broadcast staff discovers asking good questions is only the first step