I used this assignment with our Intro to Communication students as a means of active learning during a 50 minute one shot session. The students are grouped into current event topic areas (such as education, environmental, health etc.) and then select topics to speak on that go along with their broad topic heading. The students didn't actually like passing their papers around within their group so I changed the assignment so that we still work on it in chunks (I have students stop between sections) but they work on their own papers/topics instead.