Sidebar assignment: Could it happen here?

I mentioned the Jaws sidebar in Wednesday's Section 02 class, and I'll mention it Monday in 01. Here's the deal:

You will recall that a sidebar is a story that accompanies a "mainbar," or main story, and illuminates a subject that wouldn't fit into a main story.

In the case of shark attacks on Amity Island, if you are a newspaper in the New Hampshire Seacoast area and there is a story about shark attacks on Martha's Vineyard, you are probably going to run the AP version of the story in your paper, but you know your readers will be thinking, "Could it happen here?"

So that's what you're going to find out. You'll need to consult some experts, since this is a real story. You are going to tell your readers about the risk of shark attacks in New Hampshire (or northern New England in general), the history of shark attacks in New England, and maybe even what to do if there is a shark attack.

So you'll need to think about who might be a shark attack expert in the area. And you'll need to think about reliable places to collect data about shark attacks. You want your Seacoast reader to be able to say conclusively, "Yes, kids, you may swim," or, "Don't even think about going near the water."

Then write a 350-word story that will accompany your main story on whatever happens next week. The lead for this story will of course report your findings. There should be a quote from a live, expert source within the first three paragraphs. And you will have to include a paragraph of background for those who are too lazy to read the mainbar, i.e., a paragraph quickly orienting readers as to what has gone on so far.

Please post this story on your blogs before your next class

Good luck!

Portfolio requirements

For both sections of Writing and Reporting the News, portfolios are due at the beginning of the final class. Portfolios should be neat, complete, and contain any notes necessary about missing material or anything else I should know about.

All portfolios will contain 3 ungraded stories from the beginning of the semester.

Portfolios will also contain 8 graded stories, unless you didn't use your pass, in which case you wouldn't be very smart and would have 9 graded stories. These should be the stories we discussed with my marks all over them. No revisions necessary.

Among those stories should be at least one story representing each of the following categories: profile, meeting story, issue story, and speech story. Please clearly label which stories are meant to fulfill each of these categories.

The stories should be arranged from most recent to earliest.

Also include proof of publishing -- that could be a tearsheet (a page torn from the newspaper and showing your work) or, failing that, a printout of your story as it appeared on the Web along with the URL where I can find it.

Also include the due date on each graded story. Story dates for Section 01 are Sept. 30, Oct. 7, 14, 21 and 28, and Nov. 4, 12, 18, and 25. Section 02 dates are Oct. 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30; Nov. 6, 13, 20; and Dec. 4.

For Section 2: No story due Dec. 2, the Monday after Thanksgiving.

For Section 1: Choose the date for your final story: Nov. 27 at noon or Dec. 4, depending on whether you want your Thanksgiving ruined or not.

Everyone conferences the last week of school. Next week, I will only see those who conference Monday (Section 02.)

Hope this all makes sense. Let me know if you have any questions.

Link to Globe's bombing survivor story

As promised, here's the link to the Sarah Schweitzer's wonderful story on the guy who was injured in the Marathon bombing.

Next week, both 621 sessions

On Monday we will be combining the two 621 sections for a Monday class. Wednesday Section .02 students will attend the Monday .01 class for this one time to take advantage of a special class guest. There will be no Wednesday class for .02.

Our guest will be Meg Heckman. She is riding the crest of the wave into the new world of digital reporting and publishing. Meg will join the UNH Journalism Program faculty as a lecturer in January. Here is her bio:

I’m a post-platform journalist with more than a decade of experience covering communities both big and small. I attended the University of New Hampshire and completed fellowships with the Poynter Institute and the New York Times Foundation. I'm currently a graduate student at Northeastern University where I'm researching women's roles in emerging digital news organizations. My recent work has been published by Poynter.org, Editor & Publisher, NetNewsCheck.com, the Columbia Journalism Review and the Center for Digital Ethics & Policy at Loyola University. 

Meg has asked that you do some reading to prepare you for the class, so here is an assignment. Remember, this is in addition to your regular weekly stories, which are due Monday in class for section .01 and Wednesday by noon via email for section .02. Everyone in both sections should do this reading.

Meg plans a quick overview of how online narrative has evolved and then ask students to take of their stories from the term so far and try to adapt it to one of the new platforms. This means you should have access to a digital version of the story you would like to play with. So email the digital file to yourself, or whatever. Since this is a writing class, Meg will focus on text-heavy tools like Medium, ScrollKit, etc. So please look at this retro gem, this blog post she wrote about how one Northeastern student covered the marathon bombing, and this project by the NYT. 

A note to both 621 sections

You may have noticed or will notice that I am not always posting specific weekly assignments on the blog. At this point in the semester, you are primarily spending your time reporting and writing weekly news stories of at least 600 words and using five sources and referring regularly to the textbook and Stylebook for guidance. You will be doing this for the rest of the semester unless you hear otherwise. These stories are due at the beginning of each class.

Occasionally I will add a reading assignment or another outside-of-class activity. Whenever I do this, I will email you to let you know.

Finally, most of you are behind on your blogs. I do read these and I enjoy them and they often lead to discussion points for class. You are supposed to be doing three blogs a week on subjects of your choice as long as there is some relation to journalism. From time to time I will suggest or require a particular topic. I know it's challenging, but these blogs should be spread throughout the week. At 150 or 200 words, they shouldn't take long.

Blogger tells me when you last posted, and arranges the names on the class blog in order from most recently posted to least recently posted. Unfortunately, this list looks about the same every week for both classes. I am seeing many whose last postings were five or six days ago or even a week or more! That's not good. It's very hard to catch up once you fall behind.

Each week I am rating the blogs from 0 to 5, with five being completely up to date and high-quality, thoughtful, insightful, well-written blogs that are grammatically clean and 0 being nothing posted. At the end of the semester, your blog grades will be derived from these scores. By the end of the semester, you should have a minimum of 28 blog postings. It won't help to do 28 postings on the last day of class because that grade will already have been recorded. (At this point, I'll call it an amnesty for the weeks that have already passed, but that means some of you will still have a lot of catching up to get to the 28 required postings.

Blogging is a huge part of the newsroom experience at most news organizations these days and is almost essential for freelancers. There are many journalists who make their livings entirely from blogs. It's good to get some practice now.

Oh, and if you still don't have a photo on your blog, post it now.

Required stories

As you are aware, you are expected to submit a story nearly every week during the semester. Those stories should be at least 600 words long. There is no upper limit. Use whatever space you need to tell your story. But don’t ramble. Don't be dull.

Beginning with the next stories, to be handed in at the beginning of our next class, I will expect five specific sources cited in your stories. There will be actual quotes or paraphrases from at least three of those sources, with full attribution. That means they need to be from actual living human beings with whom you actually spoke, hopefully in person or by telephone and not by email. If it is an email source, then it should be acknowledged as such.

I also expect that now that you know how to use the Stylebook you will check carefully and edit for AP style, spelling and grammar.

In the coming weeks we’ll be discussing stories in a variety of categories. Among the stories in your portfolio will be at least one example of:

• A speech story. Just what it sounds like -- you cover a speech by someone who has something important to say, and you write a story about it.

• A meeting story. Only gatherings of elected or appointed bodies, such as town planning boards, boards of selectmen, councils, etc., or Student Senate will count. The meeting must be of a legislative body, i.e., one that sets public policy and takes votes.

• A local issue story. Also just what it sounds like – a story about an issue on which there are at least two clearly delineated sides. What are people riled up about?

• A profile.

Remember, you can do more than one story in any category, but each of the categories must be represented at least once in your portfolio.

Again, we’ll be talking in class about each kind of story at some point. If you want to do one of them before we discuss it, you will find an explanation in the textbook.

And don’t forget to publish a story in TNH!

621.01 assignment for Oct. 7

1. Re-read carefully Pages 70-85 in the textbook. We will talk about sources, resources, quotes, and attributions next week.

2. Listen to this story on a former investigative reporter who was hired to teach everyone at ESPN how to conduct compelling interviews.

3. Listen to this interview, which is the ESPN guy's favorite. You will think I'm kidding when you hear it, but think about it and the reasons he might have for thinking it's such a great interview. Be prepared to discuss this in class. What did he do right? How could he have screwed it up?

4. Reflecting on what you read in the textbook and heard on NPR, and looking over the two stories you have written so far, post on your blogs an analysis of the sourcing you used in those two stories. In hindsight, did you talk to the right people? Did you ask the right questions? Can you see ways of improving your interviewing skills? Was your information correctly attributed? What have you learned about sources? The posting should be 200 words or longer, and will count as one of your three blogs for the week.

5. A regular weekly story. This one should be 600 words long and contain 5 sources, at least three of whom are directly quoted. The other two don't need to be quoted, but please list them at the end of your story.

6. Two more blog postings in addition to the one mentioned in #4 above. If you want to use one to react to the interview you heard on NPR, that's fine. Third can be anything you choose, such as reflecting on your reading in the Boston Globe or talking about the challenges and rewards of the delayed lead.

Section 01 assignment for Monday, Sept. 23

1. Read Chapter 6 in the textbook.

2. Find an original news story idea and report and write it. 600 words, four sources this time. Feel free to try any of the styles you read about in Chapter 6 if you feel they are appropriate. Just remember that a summary news lead is the most commonly used lead in journalism.

3. Continue reading the Boston Globe online. We'll do an exercise around it next week to see how closely you are following the news.

4. Post three blog entries, 150-200 words each, on journalism-related topics of your choosing. Please spread these out through the week rather than waiting until Monday morning to post them. Your Globe reading should give you some good ideas for blog entries.

621.02 assignment for Class #4, Sept. 18

1. Read Chapter 6 in the textbook.

2. Find an original story idea (you are welcome to any of the ones we discovered last week in our photo exercise) and report and write it. 500 words, four sources this time. Feel free to try any of the styles you read about in Chapter 6 if you feel they are appropriate. Just remember that a summary news lead is the most commonly used lead in journalism.