Your Final Portfolio Assignment is now available! I’ll also embed it on the Assignments page. Let me know if you have questions. Enjoy your break!
Category Archive: assignments
Oct 05
Week of Oct. 8: Interviewing, Research, and Feature Writing
We’ll play catch-up a little bit this week to make up for our hectic evening of debate watching and live tweeting! The audience at the debate generated 519 #mscmprez tweets — that’s amazing. Great work on your tweeting! We’ll debrief on Tuesday. We’ll also spend some time that day talking about interviewing strategies and research …
Sep 03
Week of Sept. 3: Learning to Use Twitter and AP Style
This week, we’ll venture into the land of Twitter — a new journey for some of you — and also introduce you to Associated Press style for the first time. Here are some links you’ll need this week: Newsroom101 Analyzing Blogs and Tweets assignment (due at the beginning of class on Thursday) Installing Publicize on …
Mar 18
Week of March 19: Grammar, Interviewing, and Preparing for the Profile Article
This week, we’ll spend a fair bit of time on grammar, but will also cover some of the information you need as you prepare for the profile article assignment, which we’ll begin right after Spring Break. We’ll watch this “Colbert Report” interview as a fun way of getting into our discussion of interviewing: The Colbert …
Mar 04
Week of March 5: Grammar, Research, and More
This week we’ll have our first “official” grammar day and take a good, hard look at pronouns. What are they and what do they do for us? It may have been a while since you asked those questions. This topic will be one of the first we’ll examine together based on the results of your …
Feb 26
Week of Feb. 27: The Inverted Pyramid…”Because the Good Stuff’s on the Top”
We’re going to delve more deeply into newswriting this week and go beyond the lead. We’ll write two inverted pyramid stories and a variety of other types of leads, and also get started on a “mapped” story. Your first assignment this week will be to write an inverted pyramid story based on these facts. A …
Feb 19
Week of Feb. 20: Newswriting, Social Media, and a Distinguished Guest
This week we’ll continue our discussion of the principles of newswriting with a discussion of basic story elements, especially summary leads. We’ll also look at innovations in writing for social media. We’ll talk about the exciting possibilities of live-tweeting and live-blogging events. Here are some sample summary leads we’ll analyze in class, though you can …
Feb 12
Week of Feb. 13: Online Accuracy, AP Style, and Intro to Newswriting
We have a busy week of diverse topics ahead of us! We’ll start on Monday by discussing your blog posts and first Twitter experiences. We also need to talk in more depth about online accuracy, and about the standards for correcting mistakes on blogs and in social media. Here’s a Google Presentation we’ll review together …
Feb 05
Welcome to Media Writing!
I’m looking forward to meeting all of you on Monday, Feb. 6! We’re going to start off quickly this semester and launch immediately into learning how to blog and use social media as professionals. Your first tasks this semester will include setting up your own WordPress.com blog, creating a professional Twitter account, and learning to …
