Spring semester internship opportunity

Project Return, an ecumenical social service program that works with mothers returning to the Springfield community from prison, can use an intern to work with the director in creating or updating a flier, newsletter, website or other promotional material. (More details below copied and pasted from their informational flier.) They are expanding their services and community education efforts, and this would a good experience for an intern who already has some motivation toward social justice issues and an interest in public relations. Internships are open to mass communications students at Benedictine who have a 3.0 average or better.

The intern would work with my wife Debi Edmund, who is Project Return's new director. Before seeking her master's degree in Child and Family Services at the Univerity of Illinois-Springfield, she was a public relations consultant for the Illinois Association of School Boards and is a former features editor of The Rock Island Argus (where I met her). So she is an experienced communications professional who has combined her mass comm. skills with another line of work.

PROJECT RETURN
Our Mission
Project Return’s mission is to help incarcerated mothers reintegrate into the Springfield community by matching each returning mother with a team of trained and supported volunteers for one year. We also educate the public about the barriers these women face as they seek to make a successful re-entry into the community.

Our Program
Paid staff and trained volunteer Partnership Teams help participants address immediate challenges: complying with the conditions of parole, achieving financial stability, finding immediate and permanent housing, accessing health care, reconnecting with family and friends, and resuming parental responsibilities. Without such support, released inmates are at risk of returning to criminal activity, substance abuse, or other self-defeating behaviors. Project Return hopes to break that cycle, benefiting both the clients and the community. Our comprehensive, individualized re-entry services begin prior to the individual’s release and continue for up to a year after release. Services include assistance in finding or accessing short term and permanent housing, employment, education or employment training, child care, health care, mental health care, counseling and addiction support services, reliable transportation and safety net resources. It is hoped that each participant will leave our program with improved self-esteem, better mental and physical health, and increased self-sufficiency, thus reducing the chances that she will re-offend and return to prison.

COMM 337: Truth & Project for Excellence in Journalism

The Project for Excellence in Journalism defines itself as "a research organization that specializes in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press." Originally affiliated with the Columbia School of Journalism, one of the nation's best, is is now part of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C.

Focusing especially on content analysis, the PEJ maintains a website with daily updates on the state of the media. It also posts a Statement of Shared Purpose listing nine principles developed by research project that included 40 forums with working journalists over a four-year period. Among them are several that relate to this question of truth ... including the first principle:

Journalism's first obligation is to the truth
Democracy depends on citizens having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful context. Journalism does not pursue truth in an absolute or philosophical sense, but it can--and must--pursue it in a practical sense. This "journalistic truth" is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, valid for now, subject to further investigation. Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information. Even in a world of expanding voices, accuracy is the foundation upon which everything else is built--context, interpretation, comment, criticism, analysis and debate. The truth, over time, emerges from this forum. As citizens encounter an ever greater flow of data, they have more need--not less--for identifiable sources dedicated to verifying that information and putting it in context.

Notice how the journalists at PEJ's forums think of truth as a process -- if you do it right, in so many words, you'll get it right.

All nine of the principles are important. Of special interest to us in COMM 337, perhaps, is the seventh:

It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant
Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. For its own survival, it must balance what readers know they want with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society.

You will have an opportunity to write about these issues on your final exam. How do the reporting and writing techniques in Donald Murray's "Writing to Deadline" empower us as journalists to tell the truth and get it right.

COMM 337: More viewpoints on truth (and a final exam hint)

If you start looking for the truth, I'm discovering, it turns out everybody's got an opinion on it. And their brother, their sister, their second cousin once removed and their cocker spaniel puppy, too. (Well, maybe that's not 100 percent true about the cocker spaniel puppy.) But I think it is important. And I think this issue of telling the truth can tie together several things we've touched on in COMM 337:

• How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques -- e.g. looking for surprise, his interview tips, etc. -- help us learn the truth as reporters?
  
• How do his techniques for telling a story -- finding the "line," explaining context, etc. -- help us communicate the truth to our readers?
  
• What do other working journalists, or former journalists like those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth?
  
• How important is telling the truth to journalistic ethics? Where do you draw the line in an age of shrinking newspaper readership and declining audiences for "mainstream" (i.e. network style) TV news?

Here are some resources I found on the internet:

The current issue (Fall '07) of San José State University's alumni magazine, Washington Square Magazine, asked students and faculty there "What is truth?" Three definitions stood out:

Thomas Leddy, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, said the kind of thing you'd expect a philosopher to say. Abstract, hard to follow, but kinda well reasoned once you think about it a while:

Truth is a triune concept, all sides in constant, necessary, often fruitful, and often harmful conflict. One side expresses the one-to-one fit of elements between the candidate for truth (proposition, picture, etc.) and that to which it is said to be true. The second is best expressed by William James’ idea that truth is that which is good in the way of believing. The third is the quality of heightened reality we experience when we believe we have captured the essence of something (e.g., conceptually or through art). None of these is reducible to any of the others.

Much more practical were the defintions from business and journalism profs. Michael Solt, an associate dean in the Lucas Graduate School of Business, said:

A dictionary definition of truth includes concepts like honesty, integrity, accuracy and conformity with fact. Students, and especially business professionals, understand that long-term success is dependent on such truth. Recent accounting scandals show how short-term deviations from truthfulness do come to light with severe consequences. I am very impressed with how Silicon Valley professionals, including CEOs, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists, embody these concepts in their daily behavior. While reputation and credibility play a role, I get the sense they believe that “doing the right thing” is actually the best thing for their organizations.

There's plenty there for journalists as well as business people to wrestle with. Best of all (of course), I liked what Richard Craig, an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, defined truth and operationalized it:

Truth is the facts about a situation. Unfortunately, life can take something as seemingly simple as that and complicate it enormously. Do the details of an incident obscure its root causes? Do certain actions contradict previous behaviors or disguise possible consequences? For a journalist, truth is often something that must be unearthed. It’s frequently elusive and sometimes unpleasant, but it’s a reporter’s stock in trade. It emerges when a journalist genuinely works to produce a fair and complete account. It seems somehow appropriate—for journalists, truth is the result of an honest effort.

Now this ...

I think I'm going to offer this without comment. It's a Reuters story on two Iraq war documentaries. Here's the lede:

LONDON (Reuters) - Two Hollywood directors who are part of a wave of films about the war in Iraq and the broader fallout from the September 11, 2001 attacks have said they were only doing what media failed to do -- telling the truth.

Brian De Palma's "Redacted", arguably the most shocking feature yet about events in Iraq, hits theatres on Friday, using a documentary style to tell the true story of the gang rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by U.S. troops in 2006.

Paul Haggis also based "In The Valley Of Elah", already released, on true events linked to the war, although, unlike De Palma's cast of unknown actors, he employed major stars Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon.

What jumped off the page -- uh, off the screen -- at me was those last three words in the first graf, "... telling the truth."

Read the story. It's short. And while I don't have any particular comment about, I do have some questions:

1. How would De Palma, Haggis and the others quoted in the story define the truth?

2. How do they documentary filmmakers go about seeking the truth (however they define it)?

3. What marketplace pressures make it difficult to tell the truth?

Media, 'context' in Springfield / READING ASSIGNMENT

This morning's issue of Illinois Times has a cover story and a couple of sidebars on the state of the news media. They fit in with the discussion we're having in a couple of my news-editorial classes, and they're important enough I'm assigning them to all of my mass comm. students. Read them, and be ready to cite them in class discussions, on your blogs and/or your final exam essays. You can pick up a free copy of IT from the newsrack next to the Quiet Lounge in Dawson, or read it on IT's website They tell about the pressure of declining circulation, ownership changes and a gloomy job outlook at The State Journal-Register and WICS Channel 20. All this makes it difficult, according to some of the people quoted, to do a decent, ethical job of covering the news -- writing "the best obtainable version of the truth" in Carl Bernstein's words -- in the dominant media in town. More specialized, or "niche," media in the African-American community and public radio are doing better, according to the sidebars.

There's nothing new in the doom and gloom. Ben Bagdikian, a former Washington Post editor now dean emeritus of the journalism school at the University of California-Berkley, summed it up 40 years ago when he said, "Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer."

True enough (there's that word again). But you've got to try.

This week's stories in Illinois Times tell how things are shaking out here lately, and they're not just for students who want to go into the news business. The trends are national, and they're important for everyone who deals with -- or reads, watches, listens to or surfs -- the media. Which is all of us.

A sidelight. In Amanda Parsons' story on local TV news, there's a little preview of what Benedictine students can expect from Nathan Mihelich, who will teach TV production spring semester. Formerly a Channel 20 reporter, Mihelich is now information director for the Dominican Sisters of Springfield. Says the IT story:

Mihelich will teach a new television-production course at Benedictine University/Springfield College in the spring, and he says he will use his experiences at WICS and other news stations to teach students about the value of investigative reporting, the importance of quality rather than quantity, and how to turn a story into a presentable piece that people care about and may act upon.

Read the IT stories and be ready to discuss them in class next week.

Bernstein (Marqueta)

Marqueta's post -- moved from last year's COMM 207 blog. -- pe.

"I don’t think that we are going to have such a salutary view of what happened in the Clinton presidency. Clinton’s transgressions have little in common with Watergate, which was about a vast and pervasive abuse of power by a criminal president, who ordered break-ins and firebombings, who impeded the free electoral process, who instituted illegal wiretaps and used the Internal Revenue Service as a force for personal retribution...

I was talking about, about what we do. The rise of idiot culture, which we must resist, is taking place at a time when other institutions in this society, particularly our political institutions, particularly the American Congress, have been failing us, pandering even more shamefully to polls instead of engaging in problem-solving; responding to campaign contributions instead of to the real problems, fears, needs of the people of the country; surrendering too often to demagoguery and irrelevance instead of leading the people"

Berstein is a very 'real' reporter. He speaks on the things that Elite America runs from. Berstein talked about context. I believe that context in this sense deals with 'the given'.

COMM 337: Are reporters doomed? Well, maybe ...

David Leigh, an assistant editor of the Guardian in London, with special responsibility for investigative reporting, has some glum thoughts for those who don't think newspapering is a dying industry. His headline sums up the tone of the speech: "Are reporters doomed?" His answer. Read it for yourself and make your own conclusion. But I'd say his answer is yes, probably. Says Leigh:

I fear that these developments [various forms of online publication and blogging] will endanger the role of the reporter. Of course, there will always be a need for news bunnies who can dash in front of a camera and breathlessly describe a lorry crash, or bash out a press release in 10 minutes. There will probably be a lot more news bunnies in the future. There will probably also be hyper-local sites — postcode journalism fuelled cheaply by neighbourhood bloggers. But not proper reporters.

You probably figured out how to translate from the British yourself. But a "lorry" is a truck, and British "postcodes" are like our ZIP codes. "News bunnies" needs no translation. But "high street" might be less familiar -- it's like "Main Street" in small-town America.

COMM 337: Journalism and capital-T truth

Cross-posted from this semester's class blog in COMM 207 (copy editing). It takes up a question we also mentioned in our class Monday: How can we know what the truth is? The answer here, in so many words, is we can't but we obtain something that's pretty close to it if we try hard enough.

So read this post, follow the links and be ready to answer the questions below in boldface. We'll try it in class, and if discussion lags you'll have an opportunity to write about it on your blogs. -- pe

Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story during the 1970s, has a definition that I've liked ever since I first came across it in our copyediting textbook, Modern News Editing by Mark Ludwig and Gene Gilmore (5th ed. Ames, Iowa: Blackwell, 2005). Journalism, according to Bernstein, is "the best obtainable version of the truth" (231). Ludwig and Gilmore add it's "an acknowledgement that the full truth is hard to grab hold of and may shift over time as more facts are revealed."

Turns out Bernstein has been saying it for years. Especially after he and fellow Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward were portrayed in the Hollywood movie "All the President's Men" (1976), Bernstein has been a fixture on the rubber-chicken dinner and lecture circuit. And he gives this definition of journalism to audience after audience. Usually he says it's being undermined by celebrity news and cost-cutting in U.S. newsrooms.

It makes sense to me. I think it makes sense to a lot of people who have covered the news, and who know from the experience how elusive the truth can be. I like it because it doesn't promise too much. It doesn't promise The Truth with a capital "T."

"Truth is the word that summarizes many journalistic ideas," say Ludwig and Gilmore. "But what, philosopy has always asked, is Truth? Working newsmen and newswomen know what truth means on the job and don't worry too much about the big picture, so far as they can discover and portray it." The best obtainable version, in other words, of truth.

Ironically, Bernstein credits Woodward with the phrase. When the two were interviewed by Larry King of CNN, they said:

... it -- but it -- it -- you know, and our concern is that -- and Carl makes this point, and it's a critical one, that the business of this kind of journalism, trying to get to the bottom of something complicated, hidden, scandalous, or important decisions by people who have lots of power, involves lots of sources. Not one source, not 10, but dozens or even hundreds.

BERNSTEIN: You know, Bob said right after Watergate, that really, what this story was about, like all reporting, or good reporting, is the best obtainable version of the truth. And that phrase has always stuck with me about what real reporting is. When we did "All the President's Men," it turned out unintentionally it was maybe a primer on the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors.

They went on from there, on "Larry King Live. But for me the best obtainable version of truth has something to do with "the basic kind of police reporting and slogging and knocking on doors."

In seeking the best obtainable truth, Ludwig and Gilmore suggest journalists look for several things.

The most important is accuracy. "Newsrooms rightly develop a fixation on accuracy about names and addresses. But reporters must be at least as careful about accurate quotation, or about the accuracy of the impression that results from the way facts are put together."

Almost as important is objectivity. Ludwig and Gilmore cite the conventional wisdom: "Reporters should keep themselves out of the story, and editors should see that they do."

Closely related to accuracy and objectivity is fairness. Ludwig and Gilmore have a simple standard for editors: "They treat everybody alike."

Bernstein's rubber-chicken dinner speech, as he gave it Sept. 26, 1998, at the annual convention of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, is available on line. In it he says:

The truth is often complex, very complex. “The best obtainable version of the truth” is partly about context and this is perhaps the greatest single failing of our journalism in media today. For too much of it is utterly without context. Facts by themselves are not necessarily the truth. Thus the gossip press, the tabloids, too much of what we see on the air, even when the facts are somewhat straight, they are often a form of misinformation, because their aim is to shock, to titillate, to distort, to give grotesque emphasis.

How did journalists in the good old days -- which happen to coincide with Bernstein's reporting days -- find the best obtainable version? Bernstein suggests they looked for "thoroughness, for accuracy, for context." Hard to do, he adds, when an "idiot culture" demands 24/7 coverage of celebrities and political foodfights:

The hunger for gossip and trash and simple answers to tough questions in our culture today is ravenous and the interest in real truth, hard, difficult, complex truth, that requires hard work, digging, reporting, is waning In America our political system, and I think we are seeing it now, has been failing and with its failure we have been witnessing as well a breakdown of the comity and the community and the civility, that has traditionally allowed our political discourse to evolve. The advent of the talk show nation, not just on radio, but on television especially, with its standards of the grotesque and people screaming mindlessly at each other on the air is part of this breakdown.

Does Bernstein overdo his critique? Probably. But does he have a point there? Probably. His speech has been covered by the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World and the Daily Texan, student paper at the University of Texas in Austin, among others.

It's all about process. When you don't know whether people are telling you the truth or not, what affirmative steps can you take to ensure accuracy, objectivity and fairness? My old city editor used to say, "Pete, if your dear old white-haired grandmother tells you she loves you, don't believe her! Check it out!" Is that a reasonable attitude? What other steps can you take? What would Don Murray (author of the little green book that won't go away) recommend? What do you recommend?

COMM 393: RE: Senior Portfolios/due dates reflective essay

When you get your formal assignment sheets in Communications 393 (Senior Portfolio), I'll elaborate on the due date for the self-reflective essay that goes with the senior portfolio. But I'm also sending out an email message now giving you a heads-up on it, so you can plan ahead.

The self-reflective essays papers are due Monday, Nov. 26, the first day of the week after Thanksgiving and the week before finals. Email them to me at pellertsen@sci.edu and/or peterellertsen@yahoo.com ... please also include a paper copy of the self-reflective essay in the Senior Portfolio Folder that you leave with me during our end-of-semester conference. I will schedule them later.

2. During the rest of that week, from Tuesday, Nov. 27, through Friday, Nov. 30, I will accept late papers but deduct 10 points -- i.e. a letter grade -- from the grade on the paper.

3. During the week of final exams, I will deduct another five points for each additional day the paper is late -- for a total of 15 points Monday, Dec. 3; 20 points Tuesday, Dec. 4; 25 points Wednesday, Dec. 5; 30 points Thursday, Dec. 6; and 35 points Friday, Dec. 7.

I don't like deducting points for late papers, especially for college seniors. But a few of the students who are registered for COMM 393 have been so irregular in their attendance, I believe I need to set clear deadlines and penalties. In order not to discriminate against anybody, I am obligated to set the same policies for everyone.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don't hestitate to contact me.

-- Pete Ellertsen, instructor, COMM 393

COMM 337: Assignment for Nov. 16

The following assignment sheet, together with a hard copy of the article in the Nov. 1, 2007 issue of Rolling Stone, will be handed out in class tomorrow. Students who are absent that day are responsible for securing a copy of the article, either from me or from a library that takes Rolling Stone. -- pe

COMM 337: Beyond Newswriting
Benedictine University at Springfield
Fall Semester 2007

www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/comm337syllabus.html

"There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers." -- H.L. Mencken

Fourth analytical paper (due Friday, Nov. 16). Attached is a profile of environmental scientist James Lovelock in Rolling Stone. It was written by Jeff Goodell, who writes for that magazine and the New York Times Magazine, on the basis of several interviews with Lovelock in Norway and in England. Analyze his story in terms of its news value – timeliness, impact or importance, etc. – and Goodell’s organization and narrative technique.

What is the main point of Goodell’s story? Does he have a nut graf? If so, be sure to quote it. Where is it? If not, how and where does Goodell let his readers know the main point of the story? How does he organize the interviews with Lovelock to support that point? In discussing the things that keep a story moving, Donald Murray, author of our textbook Writing to Deadline, speaks of conflict and tension. "That tension may be between one individual and another; between a new idea and an old one; between an individual and society; between a belief and a newly discovered fact; between what is said and unsaid, seen and unsaid; between the writer and the world; between what is being done and what should be done; between cause and effect; between reality and illusion" (64). How does Goodell develop that tension in this story?

How effective is the story as a whole? Is it newsworthy? Does Goodell develop it so it would interest readers in a general interest magazine like Rolling Stone? Consulting Don Murray’s "Notes on Narrative" (152-55), analyze Goodell’s story for its mastery of the story-teller's art. See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find. How effective is the story’s ending? Does the rest of the story fully prepare readers for the end?

Please tell Michelle and Christina

... that I'm trying to send them senior portfolio information by email, but the message bounced.

Thanks a million!

-- Doc

COMM 393: Reminder on Senior Portfolios

A copy of an email message I sent out this morning to students registered for Communications 393. I'm posting it to my blogs for communications students as well. I have great respect for the Benedictine/SCI grapevine, and I'll appreciate your assistance in getting the word out. -- pe.

A reminder: The end of the semester is only a month away, so it's time to pull together the material for your senior portfolios.

I will need to meet with each of you in order to: (1) inspect your professional portfolio; and (2) receive a Senior Portfolio Folder containing your self-reflective paper and copies of four pieces of work (artifacts) you have done for class, for internships and/or off-campus publications. You will keep your professional portfolio for use in job hunting, but Benedictine University will retain a Senior Portfolio Folder from each student for program assessment purposes.

I am developing a more detailed set of instructions, which I hope to email to you over the weekend, but I wanted to send out this reminder so you can get started how.

THERE ARE THREE parts to the Senior Portfolio procedure:

I. SELF-REFLECTIVE ESSAY. To be turned in, as part of the Senior Portfolio Folder, during a conference with me before the end of the semester.

The self-reflective essay will be 10 to 12 pages in length, in which you reflect on your experience as a communications major at Benedictine in terms of: (a) your progress toward developing or furthering your career goals; (b) your understanding of the profession, its ethics and its role in society. In this essay you should address the following program objectives of Benedictine's mass communications department:

1. Prepare graduates for careers in advertising, electronic and print media, journalism, public relations, publishing, writing or other careers requiring sophisticated communications skills;

2. Prepare graduates for continued study in graduate or professional school;

3. Develop the student's critical and imaginative thinking, reading and writing skills;

4. Develop skills to empower the student to communicate ideas effectively, through speaking, writing and the use of technology;

5. Develop skills for critical interpretation of the media;

6. Foster aesthetic understanding in both production and interpretation of media texts;

7. Develop knowledge of the methods to make responsible social and personal decisions;

8. Develop primary and secondary research methodologies;

9. Develop an understanding of the history, structure and operation of the mass media;

10. Provide an understanding of the impact of mass media industries and messages on the individual, society and culture;

11. Develop professional-level skills in written and oral communication for a variety of media and audiences;

12. Develop professional-level production skills for both print and electronic media;

13. Encourage the development of creative expression; and

14. Help the student develop a professional media portfolio.

II. PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO. To be inspected by me during our end-of-semester conference and returned to you. This will be a collection of your best work, preferably gathered in a presentation folder, that you can take with you on job interviews.

III. SENIOR PORTFOLIO FOLDER. To be turned in to me during our end-of-semester conference and retained by Benedictine. Since we will keep these folders, I will accept them in an inexpensive pocketed folder; you can find them in an office supply store or the school supplies aisle of most drug stores. In this folder, you will include: (a) the the self-reflective essay; and (b) at least one copy at least one piece of work (artifact) from each of the following categories:

1. A 300-level research paper written for a 300-level theory class (including COMM 317, 385, 386, 387, or 390, and 391 if it is a theory class). It must contain proper annotation, structure, evidence, and methodology. The student must have attained a grade of at least a “B” on the paper in its original form for it to be accepted for this requirement.

2. A print-based publication, defined as an original written or produced work fixed in a printed and published medium (including newspapers, magazines and newsletters). If you do not have print publication credits, class work for COMM 207, 208, 209, 253 (equivalent to SCI's COM 221), 254, 263 (equivalent to SCI's COM 222), 264, 337, 381 or 382 can be accepted.

3. A web-based publication, i.e. creation that has been exhibited on the World Wide Web and is created for a departmental publication, internship, or work-related experience. The Sleepy Weasel counts as a web-based publication. Any other web-based artifact, including blogs or personal Web pages, must be approved by the instructor prior to the submission of the full portfolio.

4. Brochures, fliers, memos or other work product, including advertisements, pamphlets, brochures, letterheads, scripts or other copy prepared for broadcast, memos, creative briefs, campaign plans or other tangible material written in connection with a college course or an internship.

I will send you a formal assignment sheet in a few days, and there is more detail available about the senior portfolios on the COMM 393 syllabus linked to my faculty page at http://www.sci.edu/classes/ellertsen/masscom/comm393syllabus.html

If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me.

-- Pete "Doc" Ellertsen, instructor

COMM 337:

Go to Pulitzer Prize website at http://www.pulitzer.org/ and click on the "Archive" link. It will take you to a READ WINNERS and SEARCH page. Click on "SEARCH." In the timeline at the top of the page, click on "2006." You'll reach a page with a directory of winners in all categories. Click on "PUBLIC SERVICE." It will take you to a splash page with the Pulitzer Prize committee's citation, their reason for giving the award. It will say:

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper through the use of its journalistic resources which, as well as reporting, may include editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics and online material, a gold medal.

Two Prizes of a gold medal each:

Awarded to the Sun Herald, Biloxi-Gulfport, Miss., for its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers, in print and online, during their time of greatest need.

and:

Awarded to The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper's resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant.

Click on the gray tab that says "Works" and then on the link to The Times-Picayune's winning stories. Please note: This is a DIFFERENT batch of stories from the selection I asked you to read and analyze for Friday's assignment. Start now, because the computers are slow today.

Howard Kurtz on perceived media bias

Cross-posted to my mass communications blogs. -- pe

There's a story in yesterday's Washington Post that we need to read, even though it relates to material we covered earlier in the semester and/or will come back to at semester's end. It's a column by media critic Howard Kurtz on right- and left-wing perceptions of bias in the news media. To sum it up briefly, maybe a little too briefly, Kurtz thinks the media are taking fire from both sides. And he implies, without coming right out and saying it, that's about where you want to be if you're covering the news.

Kurtz has been on the talk show circuit plugging his book on network news, and he said the talk show hosts "appear to be living in parallel universes." His column is a good overview of the issue, concluding:

Bobbing along on this swirling sea of opinions, I became increasingly convinced there is a place for newscasts that at least attempt to provide viewers with a straight set of facts. To be sure, these programs make subjective judgments, sometimes miss the boat and appeal to a demographic keenly interested in all those segments on back pain and hip replacements. But it would be a shame if, in an age of infotainment, the new generation of anchors can't find ways to keep their broadcasts vital as well as balanced. Without them, after all, there would be fewer targets for "The Daily Show" to mock.

Read it. Might be a good one to print out for later use, in fact. I don't know how long The Post archives its stories on the open website.

Links on first-year student retention research

A $100,000 Lumina Foundation grant-funded study at Ball State University that attempted to answer the question “How do faculty engage first-year students in the classroom?” Directed by Paul Ranieri, acting English department chair and former director of a residence hall program for freshmen. " Some highlights:

• Ranieri spearheaded a series of summer workshops over three years starting in 2003. Instructors of core curriculum and early major courses applied to participate by identifying specific teaching challenges they wanted to tackle.
  
• ... while the general trend toward higher retention rates and overall grade point averages among students who were in the classes taught by participating faculty is not entirely consistent, the data are “consistent enough through all these different faculty members to raise some questions.”
  
• [While the grant money has been used up, Ranieri said] he hopes to expand a report he’s writing — which tracks retention and GPA data for students who enrolled in the “Lumina” courses as freshmen throughout their college careers — for publication.

Some good stuff on reading in a philosophy course:

David W. Concepción, an associate professor of philosophy, came to the first workshop series in 2003 wondering why “students in courses for some number of years said, ‘I get nothing out of the reading’” (specifically the primary philosophy texts). Discovering through student focus groups that what they meant was that they couldn’t ascertain the main points, Concepción realized that he needed to explain the dialogical nature of philosophy texts to students in his 40-person introductory philosophy course.


Whereas high school texts tend to be linear and students read them with the objective of highlighting facts paragraph by paragraph that they could be tested on, “Primary philosophical texts are dialogical. Which is to say an author will present an idea, present a criticism of that idea, rebut the criticism to support the idea, maybe consider a rejoinder to the rebuttal of the criticism, and then show why the rejoinder doesn’t work and then get on to the second point,” Concepción says.

“If you are reading philosophy and you’re assuming it’s linear and you’re looking for facts, you’re going to be horribly, horribly frustrated.”

So he worked with reading instruction:

Based on the constructivist theory of learning suggesting that students make sense of new information by joining it with information they already have, his guidelines suggest that students begin with a quick pre-read, in which they underline words they don’t know but don’t stop reading until they reach the end. They then would follow up with a more careful read in which they look up definitions, write notes summarizing an author’s argument into their own words on a separate piece of paper, and make notations in the margins such that if they were to return to the reading one week later they could figure out in 15 seconds what the text says (a process Concepción calls “flagging).

Concepción also designed a series of assignments in which his introductory students are trained in the method of reading philosophy texts. They are asked to summarize and evaluate a paragraph-long argument before and after learning the guidelines (and then write a report about their different approaches to the exercise before and after getting the “how-to” document on reading philosophy), turn in a photocopy of an article with their notations, and summarize that same article in writing. They participate in a class discussion in which they present the top five most important things about reading philosophy and face short-answer questions on the midterm about reading strategies (after that, Concepción says, students are expected to apply the knowledge they’ve learned on their own, without further direct evaluation).

Very similar to the tip sheet "Six Reading Myths" from Syracuse that I have linked to my faculty page. My classroom assessments have suggested weak reading skills across the board in all my students, even though our sophomores test at national averages on normed ACT Inc. reading tests. This has been consistent in freshman English, sophomore lit, introductory mass communications and junior- and senior-level news-editorial classes.

Carnegie Mellon has good advice for teaching first-year students on its website for TAs, including a a checklist for covering course objectivesin daily lesson plans. Included are these that relate to reading, or more properly provide students with a context for their reading:

• Prioritize 2-3 main points that you want students to leave the room remembering.
  If you try to cover much more, the key points can get lost in a flood of details.
  
  
• In prioritizing, be sure that you can explain why learning each main topic is important.
  When you can identify up front why students should learn about a topic, students are often better able to follow the goals, structure, and flow of the class.
  
  
• Plan classes to complement the textbook, not replace it.
  It is useful to check with colleagues in your discipline to see how they connect readings with in-class learning.

More on 9-11 coverage

David Usborne is the New York correspondent for The Independent, a center-left newspaper in London. He was in lower Manhattan Sept. 11, 2001, and he knew immediately his coverage of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centers would be the story of his life. Reading it now, several years later, it brings back the immediacy he tried to convey to readers in England.

At the end of 2001, he wrote an account of how he covered the story and how he felt that day that is, to my mind, one of the best pieces of reporting to come out of that tragedy. He also captured the conflicting emotions and instincts of a reporter covering a very big story in a way that I think any hard news reporter will recognize.

I cannot really describe how I felt then. Everything else – deadlines, cellphones, whatever – drained from my mind. I felt nausea. I suddenly felt terribly frightened. And profoundly shocked. Death is disturbing always, but there are places when perhaps you expect it. A hospital or a battlefield. Foreign correspondents may see it more than most. But this was a beautiful morning in September – in Manhattan. I was correspondent in New York, for heaven's sake, not Jerusalem or Rwanda. Or Belfast. Those jumpers are still with me. Until recently, I could not talk about them without fighting back the need to cry.

The rest of his account relives that day, from the time he rushed to lower Manhattan in the morning to his trying -- unsuccessfully -- to unwind in an East [Greenwich] Village bar shortly before midnight.

Also linked below are:

• Usborne's spot news coverage on Sept. 12, 2001.
  
• A story Sept. 18, 2001, by David Lister, also of The Independent, on spot news coverage of the attacks by news media in general.

Read all three stories, and answer the following questions:

1. How do Usborne's accounts of the terrorism that morning in New York City stack up as pieces of writing? Compare and contrast his deadline story that ran Sept. 12 with his year's-end retrospective Dec. 28. What's the same? What's different? What does it tell you about deadline writing?

3. What do you learn from reading Usborne about the ethics and instincts of a journalist? Your careers, hopefully, will involve events that much less dramatic. But there may be some of it you can apply to your own writing. What does Usborne say that you can so apply?

COMM 337: Third analytical paper, due Nov. 9

For your next analytical paper, I want you to read the New Orleans Times-Picayune's prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina. I can't give you a direct link to the stories, but here's the path.

Go to Pulitzer Prize website at http://www.pulitzer.org/ and click on the "Archive" link. It will take you to a READ WINNERS and SEARCH page. Click on "SEARCH." In the timeline at the top of the page, click on "2006." You'll reach a page with a directory of winners in all categories. Click on "BREAKING NEWS REPORTING." It will take you to a splash page with the Pulitzer Prize committee's citation, their reason for giving the award:

For a distinguished example of local reporting of breaking news, presented in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Awarded to the Staff of The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, for its courageous and aggressive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, overcoming desperate conditions facing the city and the newspaper.

Click on the little gray tab that says "Works." It's second from the left. That will take you to a directory of the stories submitted in this catagory. The top one has a head in all-caps that says "CATASTROPIC." The rest are from the period August 30-September 3. Read them.

Choose one or two, and analyze them like you did the columns by Steve Lopez of The Los Angeles Times and the coverage of 9-11 by staff of The Wall Street Journal. Consulting Donald Murray's "Notes on Narrative" in our textbook (pages 152-55), and analyze the stor(ies) you choose for their mastery of the story-teller's art.

See how many of the narrative techniques Murray describes you can find. Quote them. Quote freely. Quote them. Quote freely. Post your analysis to your blog. Be sure to link to the Lopez column you analyze. Due in class Friday, Nov. 9.