The Mackerel Wrapper

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

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

COMM 209: Today's assignment ...

There is a blood drive downstairs, sponsored by the Public Relations Club. Your assignment: Write a 10- to 15-column-inch story on the blood drive.

Questions you want answered (are you read for this?) would be:
  • Who?
  • What?
  • When?
  • Where?
  • Why?
Talk to the sponsors. (You'll need to exercise an important job skill: Get the information you need, but don't get in their way.) Observe. Talk to some students. Dean Broeckling, if he's around. Faculty. Anybody you can find.

Write it as a "color" story. A feature, in other words. Let your reader know what it's like to be there. Etc.

Etc.

And etc.

Due Friday.
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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.