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Features staff celebrates Chinese New Year and brainstorms story ideas using fortune cookies

I bought a pack of fortune cookies. We had fun coming up with story ideas.

The Chinese New Year begins Monday. It’s the year of the dragon. To celebrate and as a way of brainstorming story ideas, I gave each one on my staff a fortune cookie. We took turns and read our fortunes and then brainstormed story ideas based on the fortune.

We came up with some really creative, out-of-the box ideas. These included a Tweety Awards Contest (Think top Twitter accounts to follow under such categories as funniest, most helpful, foodie, etc.), profiling a young adult with Asperger’s syndrome and looking at the population of nursing homes to determine if there are more dementia patients, etc.

Do you have any ideas to share? We’d love to hear them.

April Trotter, left, and Erin McCracken open their fortune cookies.


Sarah Chain seems happy with her fortune. It said that she was going to meet someone special at a social event.

John Hilton opens his fortune. I think his had something to do with brain power because he thought about profiling members of Mensa in an alternate story form.

Entertainment editor Pat Abdalla has a good laugh. Actually, I think he was the only one in the group who didn't mind being photographed.