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.