A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Friday, February 27, 2009

COMM 209: Friday's class, Monday's assignment

While we watched the 21-minute 49-second video on The Rocky Mountain News' final home page, I emailed this writing assignment to myself and announced it to the class at the end of the video:
Write a first-person reaction to the news of the closing of The Rocky Mountain News. How do you feel about it as a student taking a course in newspaper journalism? What does it tell you about the economy? About the future of the mass communications industry? About your own career choices?
Length = 500 to 750 words. Due in class Monday. Short sentences. Short grafs. Try to make it sound like a newspaper column.

If you missed class, you can make it up by watching the video and writing the reaction piece (sometime known as a "reax" in the trade). Due Monday.

If you want to see a good example of a column to pattern your story after (whether you were in class or not), here's one by business editor Rob Reuteman

And one by opinion columnist Mike Littwin

And one by ...

Oh, hell, just read them all. I've been clicking through the "Columns & Blogs" at the upper right corner of The Rocky's home page, and they're all well written. Several reflect back over their career and tell how they feel about being a reporter. "All I have ever wanted from this life is to tell its stories," said feature writer Bill Johnson:
The Rocky gave me that. It gave me this year's inauguration, stories too many to mention here. I have, though, always tried to write commensurate with the gift of those opportunities.

And since we are here, just talking, let me tell you that I have derived my utmost joy from talking to and writing about the stories of everyday people who otherwise would never make the paper.

They are the desperately poor and homeless, little kids whose lives were irreparably marred by their being placed in police handcuffs, everyday people whose stories otherwise would not be told.

It is what I do. ...
Johnson and Littwin have been hired by The Denver Post, until today The Rocky's broadsheet competition and now the only daily newspaper in Denver.

No comments:

Blog Archive

About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.