The guy with a 1600 on his SAT isn't the first to do it. No student exists solely inside school walls. Things going on outside the school affect peers as much as things within, and most of the time there's very little separating the two types. Things that happen at home affect the school life, a city's results of a race relations study affects the school as well. When we do story ideas, our paper becomes a dictatorship.
People come up with as many story ideas as they can.
Granted, some will be crap. It's my job to get those out of there. Then I assign those stories to people and give them a very specific due date. We talk about the angle they need to take and what sources will be important. It only takes a handful of people to churn out an amazing paper.