Today’s assignment was to watch Sean Dunne’s remarkable, 23-minute documentary, American Juggalo, and think about how you would have handled that assignment — to spend a couple of days in the midst of the juaggalos at their annual bacchanal in an Illinois campground each August. Factor in everything: the kind of people you’d be talking to, the heat/humidity, the safety issue. How deeply would you throw yourself into it? At least one student said she’d just have to decline the assignment. That’s something to really think about when you’re on the cusp of deciding whether or not to be a reporter/photographer or to look for a desk job. If it could all be done from the comfort of our computer screens, it wouldn’t be journalism. (Too much of it is already done from a chair.)