Demonstrate an understanding of a journalistic story’s context

To demonstrate what we now know about producing 21st-century journalism with examples of article-writing that represent our best-quality work.

To reflect on our accomplishment of course objectives and the ways this course material may be valuable in our future activities and careers.

** As a reminder, those course objectives are:

Identify the major principles that guide 21st-century journalists, including newsworthiness, style, modality, and some ethical and legal frameworks.

Identify the parts of a news story, describe the relationship among those parts, and explain the way they work together to produce meaning.

Demonstrate an understanding of a journalistic story’s context and audience.

Articulate, evaluate, and justify journalistic writing choices at various stages of the revision process, including sentence-level grammatical errors and stylistic effects, AP style, structure, coherence, and multimedia integration.

Consume media content with a more informed and critical eye.

COMPONENTS

DETAILS

Reporting — schedule “interviews” (use the name Aanika Batra a sophomore at Albion College and Athena Levigne a junior at Albion College for your interviewee names!) , perhaps do some internet research, — in short, gather all the materials you need to make the story the best it can be.

Components you MUST have in your story:

Headline

Byline (author’s name)

Date

Lead — standard (Inverted Pyramid) or narrative/anecdotal

Clear organization — Inverted Pyramid, ice-cream cone, kebab, other

Quotes from multiple sources — indirect AND direct, all properly attributed

Emphasis on one or two distinct FOCII elements

At least ONE non-text media — photo slideshow with captions (3 or more photos), short audio or video clip, short form (good content that is effective as a visual element)

Requirements: 2 pages

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.

Demonstrate an understanding of a journalistic story’s context