Week 10 Summary and Spring Break Advisory

TUESDAY:
-Most of the class was spent analyzing the elements of a news feature article from the L.A. Times about a family conflict over guns, after the daughter was shot by a boyfriend who had stolen her own father’s gun to do it. (Question sheet will be uploaded onto the mcreporters.blogspot.com website).
-We then did Number 6 on page 206 of the text, a 15-minute free (stream-of-consciousness) writing exercise on a turning point moment in your life. (Results were terrific!) Feel free to do free writing on the other four subjects listed in that exercise. The author Julia Cameron believes in free writing every morning of your life to get your ‘stuff’ out of your system and get you warmed up for your work as a writer.

ASSIGNMENT:
Number 1 on page 206 was assigned, to be handed in the first day back after spring break. Be sure to incorporate some dialogue into your colorful, descriptive writing.
It is acceptable to do the assignment at a Starbucks or other café. Even though this is a feature writing exercise, remember it is journalism not fiction: accuracy of quotes and details is still important.

THURSDAY:
- This was the last day to get credit for handing in the speaker/meeting story and your story pitch assignment.
- A big round of applause went out to Dylan for getting the front page of the Student Voice, for his story on the Rocketdyne meeting.
- We again discussed what the differences are between hard news, soft news, news feature, analysis, and opinion journalism. (We acknowledged that you may sometimes take a feature approach to hard news, as in the Middle East story by Nomi Morris which is to be emailed and mounted on the website. But the safest best on a first-day, hard news story is to go with a hard news lead.)
- We compared up on the screen three different versions of an AP story on the Kansas woman who was stuck to the toilet seat.
- We spent the last segment of class taking a news story about dying pigeons and rewriting the lead twice: once as a hard new lead, once as a feature story lead. (this exercise will also be mounted on the website).

READING:
- New chapters to be read are Chapters 13 and 14 on Accuracy, Law, and Media Ethics
- Compulsory re-reading of pages 38 – 42 (quotes and attribution) as well as pages 174 – 181 (inverted pyramid and other story structures). Also – the additional handouts on Inverted Pyramid that I supplied in January. You will find that reading this material again now will have a whole new meaning after the amount of news writing you’ve done.

SPRING BREAK ADVISORY:
- Please come to class after the break prepared to state what story you would like to do that will count as your submission to the Student Voice.
- Please get into the habit of reading 5 – 10 pages each evening so that you will be caught up in all the reading after the break
- Please read through the AP stylebook from M- Z if you haven't already done so.

The following are the chapters that have been assigned so far this semester (all of which will be covered in the final exam):

- Chapter 1 – Changing face of news coverage
- Chapter 2 – The basic news story
- Chapter 5 - Interviewing
- Chapter 6 – Grammar and Usage
- Chapter 7 – Leads and Nut Graphs
- Chapter 8 – Story Structure
- Chapter 9 – Feature Writing Technique
- Chapters 13 and 14 – Accuracy, Law and Ethics (newly assigned)
- Chapter 18 – Speeches, Meetings, Press Conferences
- Chapter 20 – Crime

Consume journalism over the break; read critically newspapers, magazines and web news. Listen critically to radio and television reporting.

Go back over the blogsite and re-read items of interest (such as the two places I have mounted writing tips).

For those who haven’t already done so, please compile all your writing assignments in a portfolio and keep your quizzes as well. I will have a master list of what everybody is missing and if anything is in dispute we can take it from there.

(I will check my vcccd email at least every other day).

HAVE A GREAT SPRING BREAK!