Gamechangers

Journalism is a field where one person can make a difference.

CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow, who reported live from rooftops during the London Blitz, and in the 1950s challenged Senator McCarthy's Red scares. The closing words of his broadcasts, "Good night, and good luck," became his byline.

Dan Rather, another CBS newsman, in 1963 reported from the hospital in Dallas that President Kennedy had died. Later, he filed reports from the jungles of Vietnam, that helped to inform Americans about what was going on there.

Tom Wolfe, a master stylist, helped to create an entirely new way of writing news with his works "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test" and "The Right Stuff." He inspired a generation of writers, reporters, and magazines like Rolling Stone.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for The Washington Post, looked into a sleepy police report of a burglary at the Watergate Hotel, and their reports led them directly to the Oval Office, forcing a sitting President of the United States to resign.




The Spotlight team at The Boston Globe, has worked since the 1970s to investigate and report on matters of critical public interest, including (famously) reports of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. This team of exemplary reporters and editors is renowned for its work.

Assignment: We're working on presentations of important and notable figures in American journalism and the information industry. Who are you looking into? Share your topic and some interesting information from your findings so far. Your post must be at least 200 words. Each team please note your names on the post.  Due date: by the end of class on Thursday, April 20.

Social Media

Social media refers to applications or web architectures that allow us to share, collaborate and generate content ourselves, often within a network of trusted users that we select ourselves. What kind of social media tools do you use?

Assignment: Part I: Discuss the social media tools you use, and what you use them for. Try to be as specific as you can. How often do you use them? What kind of information do you get you from them? What kind of information do you provide to them? How do you decide who to include and exclude from your network of trusted users? What do you think you'd lose if you didn't have this technology? Would you gain anything?

Part II: Track your social media usage for a few days. What are people in your network sharing and discussing? What are you sharing and discussing?

Your post should be at least 300 words. Due date: By the end of Tuesday, April 18.

What's your Story?

We're working on our story assignments this week. What's your story?


Assignment:
Tell us what you're working on and how it's going. What's a good quote that'll be showing up in your story? Include some discussion about your sources, too. Your post should be at least 200 words. Due date: by the end of Tuesday, March 28.

What's in the News?

What's in the news these days that's attracting your interest? Pick a couple of stories from the period March 9-March 16 and tell us why they interest you.

Assignment: Discuss the stories themselves, and also how they're presented. Here are some points to help get you thinking:

• What website or print publication do the stories appear in?
• Where on the page exactly are they?
• How would you describe the writing style?
• Do the stories have ancillaries and talkback features like comments? What do these add to the story?

Your post should be at least 300 words. Due date: Tuesday, March 21.

Describe a Scene

We've been reviewing and discussing news items, and reading about various ways to organize observed information.

We've also been discussing the way media producers and writers rely on observation and personal tastes, to get ideas across.

Assignment: Take notes observing people in action and what they say. Post a narrative description of a particularly interesting or colorful exchange or conversation you witnessed or participated in. Set the scene: note when and where this happened, and who the people were, why this occurred (or why you think it did) and whatever other details help to bring the scene to life, including any dialogue you consider interesting or useful. Don't just list the events you've observed—organize them thoughtfully, to interest the reader.

Your post should be at least 300 words long. Due date: by the end of Thursday, March 16.

Media Convergence

Media convergence refers to the use of different delivery methods by the same information provider, to package and deliver news. It means delivering news in different ways, to different platforms. It's multimedia.

Convergence involves writing and audio and video elements. Sometimes these technologies and products result in new business models. All or any one of these are sometimes called "disruptive."

It means that USA Today, for instance, can deliver a story about Superbowl LI, by writing about it in its print edition, having an updated and updating story on its web site with live chat and live video, and having links to plays so that we can watch highlights.

What convergence means in practice, is that traditional news suppliers compile information, and then package it for us to read, see, and hear, in hardcopy and on different devices.

This is a departure for many news organizations, which for several decades focused on mostly one medium like print or radio.

For newspapers, it means using audio and video, and using the Web.

For radio and television, it means focusing more on the written components, and using the Web to visualize some of their broadcasts.

For the reader, it means more ways than ever to get information from these places.

At its best it means an interactive information experience that leaves us feeling and thinking we learned something in an easy way that is simple to discuss and share. (And sharing itself is an entire field.)

For the news organizations, it means acquiring new technologies and skills, and having them work together to package the information. The information may not all be packaged together or all at once, but think of the news item or story as a package-- a discrete bundle of information that we can use in different ways and at different times.

The Story of Journalism

We’ve been reading about the “story” of journalism and reviewing some of the history and ideas important to the field.

Assignment: Review the "Story of Journalism" reading for this week and your notes. Using these and your own experiences, discuss what interested you most about the reading, and what interests you most about journalism and the information gathering industry.

Your post should be at least 300 words long. Due date: by the end of Thursday, February 23.