revised 03/20/10
Trend Billboard Assignment
03/22/10
TREND BILLBOARD—Write the billboard paragraph or paragraphs for your trend story. The objective is to take your best shot at conveying the main point and significance of your story as you presently envision it. You should be able to take these sentences and insert them into your final story as you have written them, unless subsequent reporting causes your main point to change.
For bonus points, attach a killer quote to the end of your billboard.
File your billboard in the Trend Story Billboard dropbox of D2L by midnight Sunday, March 28.
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Trend Story Assignment
03/03/10
TREND STORY—Report and write a minimum 750-word feature providing specific, anecdotal examples of a broader topic with inherent news value. The objective is to find one or more colorful and informative microcosms that help readers better understand an important trend, event, study, statistic or other notable phenomenon in the news. The story will require a combination of authoritative and anecdotal source material. Your finished story must contain original, current reporting and quotes from a minimum of five interviews. It must be suitable for publication with all sources fully identified.
Deadlines:
• Sunday, March 7: Submit at least two ideas for possible trend story subjects. File your ideas in the Trend Story Idea dropbox in D2L.
• Sunday, March 14: File your final Trend Story idea.
• Sunday, April 4: First draft.
• Sunday, April 18: Final draft.
Stories must contain:
• original, current reporting.
• quotes from a minimum of five interviews (a mix of experts who can discuss the trend and ordinary people who illustrate it).
• supporting facts, statistics and historical information, as needed.
Stories must not contain:
• anecdotal examples using roommates, friends or relatives (unless approved in advance and disclosed in story).
• quotes from any of the above.
• quotes taken from other stories (unless approved in advance and fully attributed).
• information attributed to other news media that you could have reported yourself.
Grading criteria:
• -Idea (originality, scope, difficulty).
• -Reporting (effort, resourcefulness, difficulty).
• -Writing (creativity, structure, style, errors).
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Story Structure Assignment
02/24/10
BILLBOARD SEARCH—Find a long, well-written feature story with some kind of “billboard” paragraph or paragraphs containing a summary of the story’s main point and an allusion to its broader significance. The article can be a profile, a trend story or a narrative feature, just as long as it doesn’t start with a traditional inverted-pyramid summary lead. Print out the story, draw a box around the summary and significance material, and write “Billboard” in the margin. For extra credit, draw boxes around other identifiable sections of text, such as scenes or supporting statistics, and label them, too. Turn in your autopsy report before leaving today (Wednesday, Feb. 24) or bring it with you to class on Monday (March 1).
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IMMERSION STORY SCENE ASSIGNMENT
Feb. 15, 2010
IMMERSION SCENE 1—By midnight Sunday Feb. 21, file a minimum 300-word scene chapter for your Immersion Story. For many of you, this will be your opening scene, although it doesn’t have to be. You can add as much summary and significance content as you like, but at a minimum, get your real-time narrative rolling with this opening. Put your file in the Immersion Story Scene 1 dropbox of D2L. Remember to double-space, include your name in the file name, and put your name, the date and the word count on the first page.
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ONE SENTENCE ASSIGNMENT
Feb. 15, 2010
Summarize the main point of your Immersion story in one sentence of no more than 35 words. Do the same thing with your Profile story. File a single Word document containing both one-sentence descriptions in the One Sentence dropbox in D2L before class Wednesday, Feb. 17.
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CLASSMATE PROFILE
In-Class Assignment
02/03/10
• Re-interview the classmate you introduced during the first class session. (If he or she is not here, we’ll find a substitute.) Plan on spending 10 minutes or so collecting information from them. When you’re done, give them 10 minutes or so to ask you questions.
• See if you can find a good human-interest angle as the central theme of your story. (Look at the list below, copied from “Vieth’s Five Secrets,” for examples of the universal themes that make people stories more interesting.) Try to get your classmate to volunteer something revealing about themselves.
• Write a short feature story about your classmate, with a lead based on your human-interest angle. Plan on writing at least 300 words. (If you got much information from your classmate, you may find that it’s easy to write a much longer story.) Be sure to include basic biographical info, such as age and hometown.
• File your story in the Classmate Profile dropbox of D2L. You might be able to finish it in class today. If not, you can file it any time before our next class. Besides filing it in D2L, email a copy to your classmate. (That means you’ll need to get his or her email address.)
Good writing connects with one of the big themes that resonate with readers:
-turning points -epiphanies
-life and death -love and loss
-winning and losing -alienation and reconciliation
-triumph and tragedy -underdogs and long shots
-heroism and villainy -kids and animals
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ProfileAssign
02/01/10
PROFILE— Report and write a minimum 750-word biographical story about an interesting person you don’t already know. The subject does not need to be rich, famous or powerful; some of the most compelling profiles focus on ordinary, overlooked people. Unless I agree in advance to an exception, profiles of close friends or relatives are not allowed. Your finished story must contain original, current reporting and quotes from a minimum of three interviews. It must be suitable for publication with all sources fully identified. For bonus points, include photos, audio clips, video clips or other multimedia material.
Deadlines:
• Sunday, Feb. 7: Submit two ideas. File in the Profile Idea dropbox in D2L.
• Sunday, Feb. 14: Submit a final profile idea.
• Sunday, Feb. 28: First draft.
• Sunday, March 14: Second draft.
Stories must contain:
• original, current reporting.
• quotes from a minimum of three interviews (in addition to the profile subject, a mix of friends, family, associates, competitors, critics, experts and others, depending on the subject matter and type of profile).
• biographical and historical information, as needed.
• supporting facts and statistics, as needed.
Stories must not contain:
• profiles of roommates, friends or relatives (unless approved in advance and disclosed in story).
• quotes from any of the above.
• quotes taken from other stories (unless approved in advance and fully attributed).
• information attributed to other news media that you could have reported yourself.
Grading criteria:
• idea (originality, scope, difficulty).
• reporting (effort, resourcefulness, difficulty).
• writing (creativity, structure, style, errors).
• mechanics (spelling, grammar, style)
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IMMERSION STORY ASSIGNMENT
01/26/10
Pick a person, group, organization, project or process you can track for the remainder of the semester. I recommend that you have one central character in your story. Spend several hours every week making contact with your subject, conducting interviews and research, and recording your subject’s progress over time. Write a minimum 2,000-word feature displaying your mastery of in-depth reporting skills and descriptive, narrative storytelling techniques. For extra credit, include photos or other multimedia elements. Include a source list with names, email addresses and phone numbers. For this story, you should interview a minimum of five people and incorporate a variety of source material. You should include a minimum of five scenes or chapters describing what you observed and learned at different points of time in your reporting. The story must be suitable for publication with all sources fully identified. This is your biggest assignment of the semester and has the highest point total.
Points: 300 out of 1,000
Deadlines:
• Sunday, Jan. 31: Immersion story idea
• Sunday, Feb. 7: Revised idea
• Sunday, Feb. 14: Final idea
• Sunday, Feb. 28: Scene 1
• Sunday, March 7: (WV Scene 1 markup returned)
• Sunday, March 14: Scene 2
• Sunday, March 28: Scene 3
• “ “ (WV Scene 2 markup returned)
• Sunday, April 4: (WV Scene 3 markup returned)
• Sunday, April 11: Scene 4
• Sunday, April 18: Immersion story first draft
• “ “ (WV Scene 4 markup returned)
• Sunday, April 25: Immersion story second draft
• Sunday, May 2: (WV Immersion story markup returned)
• Sunday, May 9: Immersion story final draft
Stories must contain:
• original, current reporting.
• a minimum of five scenes or chapters describing what you observed and learned at different points of time in your reporting.
• quotes from a minimum of five interviews.
• supporting facts, statistics, historical information and biographical data, as needed.
• a list of human and data sources used, including email addresses and URLs.
Stories must not contain:
• anecdotal examples using roommates, friends or relatives (unless approved in advance and disclosed in story).
• quotes from any of the above.
• quotes taken from other stories (unless approved in advance and fully attributed).
• information attributed to other news media that you could have reported yourself.
Grading criteria:
• -Idea (originality, scope, difficulty).
• -Reporting (effort, resourcefulness, difficulty).
• -Writing (creativity, structure, presentation)
• -Mechanics (spelling, grammar, style).
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SELF-BIO—Write 500-word self-bio. Make it interesting. Write it like a feature story. Use a creative lead. Make it revealing. Tell me something distinctive about you. Consider using one of the universal themes that resonate with readers—turning points, crossroads, successes, failures, struggles. Your self-bio doesn’t need to focus exclusively on your interest and experience in journalism or your career goals, but mention them in passing so I’ll know where you are headed. Let me know how this class fits into the overarching trajectory of your life. Include your cell phone number and preferred email address. Put your Word file in the Self-Bio dropbox in D2L by midnight Sunday, Jan. 24.
If you have written a self-bio for me in a previous class, you have two options: 1) Write another self-bio containing different information than the first. 2) Write a minimum 500-word memo describing how you would structure this class if you were the instructor and what you hope it will accomplish for you. I’m particularly interested in your suggestions on how to allocate our limited classroom time.
Formatting: On this and every other writing assignment in this class, create a Word document with your last name in the file name, like this:
ViethSelfBio.doc.
At the top of the first page, put your name, the date, the assignment and the word count, like this:
Warren Vieth
Jan. 20, 2010
Self-Bio
829 words
DOUBLE-SPACE the text.
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SCENE STORY—Pick a street. Go there and find a good scene story. Write a minimum 750-word story based on real-time observation of a person, event or process as it is occurring. The objective to transport your readers to the scene of the story by capturing its sights, sounds, smells, characters, voices, atmosphere, mood, color and action in vivid descriptive detail. Unless I agree in advance to something else, your story must contain the voices of one or more real people, and you must identify them by their full names. Don’t write an OU campus story. Don’t write about someone or something you already know. For bonus points, include photos, audio clips, video clips or other multimedia material.
Deadlines:
• Sunday, Jan. 24: Read the sample scene stories handed out in class. Write a one-paragraph description of the scene you have chosen for your story and file it in the Scene Story Idea dropbox in D2L.
• Sunday, Jan. 31: First draft.
• Sunday, Feb. 7: Final draft.
Formatting: On this and every other writing assignment in this class, create a Word document with your last name in the file name, like this:
ViethSceneStory.doc.
At the top of the first page, put your name, the date, the assignment and the word count, like this:
Warren Vieth
Jan. 20, 2010
Scene Story
999 words
DOUBLE-SPACE the text.
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