387 paper assignment / D R A F T

Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift once said, "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

Reviewing a theater adaptation of "Lucky You" for Broadway.com , Beau Higgins says Hiaasen's columns at The Miami Herald "have outraged just about everyone in South Florida, including major politicians, law officials and even his own bosses." In "Lucky You," his targets include South Florida developers, religious quacks, redneck militias, white liberals, Hooters and, yes, the newspaper business.

Research Hiaasen, his journalism and his novels. Based on that research and your reading of "Lucky You," write a documented feature article

How does "Lucky You" reflect the ethics of a working journalist? What media trends, practices, etc. does he satirize? What would you consider the moral center of his work?

Hold it down to 1,500 words.




"A Brief Introduction to Restoration and Eighteenth Century Satire," lecture delivered by Ian Johnston in November 1998, in English 200, Section 3, Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/Eng200/satire3.htm

COMM 387: Draft goals and objectives

A. Goals Students will understand the historical development of professional journalism in England and the United States; appraise ethics, principles and craftsmanship in authors who made the transition from journalism to literature; assess the professional ethics, attitudes and craft agenda of professional journalists writing today; and reflect on how these principles and practices can inform their own professional writing.

B. Student Learning Objectives. Upon completion of the course, students will be able:

To discuss the development of journalism in the English-speaking world, from 18th-century magazines to the 19th-century penny press, "yellow journalism," muckraking and professional mass-market news media during the 19th to 21st centuries

To formulate a set of journalistic ethical standards and values, including such principles as accuracy, the verification of fact, objectivity, serving as a watchdog and exposing wrongdoing in powerful institutions; and to compare these values to commonly accepted benchmarks of literary value

To discuss and evaluate common stereotypes of journalists, including those of Ben Hecht [as reflected in His Girl Friday (1940) starring Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant]; Hunter Thompson; and Carl Hiassen, novelist and Miami Herald columnist.

To evaluate the work of literary figures including Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway in terms of values, principles and rhetorical strategies they may have acquired as journalists

To evaluate the work of journalists including Richard Harding Davis, Ernie Pyle, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Mike Royko and Robert Fisk in light of both journalistic and literary standards and rhetorical strategies

To reflect on how the values, principles and work product of journalists from 18th-century London coffeehouses to creative nonfiction markets today can help in the formation of their own personal and professional values and principles; and how some of the techniques studied might (or might not) be reflected in their own professional writing

Bloom's taxonomy -- skills-based, too

The Faculty Center for Teaching and E-Learning at the University of North Carolina Charlotte has Bloom's Taxonomy Objectives for skills-based courses as well as the cognitive domain. Also the affective domain. One to come back to.

J-blogs: Weblogs for J-school students?

After talking with a couple of students in the news-editorial sequence during finals, I'm going to start posting links to information about how journalism students might use a blog to enhance their careers. The conventional wisdom, at least in academic life, is to stay away from them. Up-and-coming professors have been denied tenure, at least so go the scare stories, because of controversy over their blogs. Middle East expert Juan Cole, who makes no secret of his utter distain for neo-conservative foreign policy, is often cited as an example. So be careful. Be especially careful of satire -- if readers can take something the wrong way, they will. Count on it. They most assuredly will.

But my instinct is certain kinds of blogs might be helpful to people just getting started in the business. ...

Especially appropriate for student journalists, perhaps, would be something like a writer's journal. This is one of those terms that means different things to different people. What I mean by a writer's journal is kind of like a notebook professional writers use to try out ideas, post observations, etc. Something, in other words, an awful lot like the blogs I had my students start fall semester in COMM 337 (advanced writing). Another warning: Don't post finished articles, or even nearly-finished articles, to your blog. Free-lance markets, as a rule, won't touch anything that's been published before. And a few of them might count your blog as a prior publication.

Again, be careful. It's a big, wide, wonderful, dangerous world out there. And the Internet is no less dangerous (and no more) than the rest of it. But you already knew that. Right?

The Helium.com writers' community website collects 15 articles under the heading Tips for keeping a journal like a professional writer. I haven't read them all, but they look very useful. I checked a couple of third-party ratings in an
Pandia Search Engine News webpage and a members' forum with comments by users at Editred.org web. Helium seems kosher, especially for beginners, but not a good way of making money by free-lancing. But in my experience nothing else is, either!

A website called the Internet Writing Journal maintains a list of "The Best Author Blogs" ... check them out. You may find something that's suited

Infed.org is a website put together by a small group of British educators who use it for "exploring informal education, lifelong learning and social action." They have a useful tip sheet "Writing and Keeping Journals" for teachers and education students.

How a band uses 'sticky' website

A band mixing the sound of Afropop, hip hop, soul and, yes, I can hear a little gospel, Soulfège is based in Boston, now doing a Sweet Mother Africa tour. Infectious music.

Also an awesome example of a band using new media. You've read about "sticky" websites? (If you're not sure, see below.) Well, this is how a well-thought-out sticky website works. Here's the band, in their own words:

So what is Soulfège? Glad you asked. Put it like this - if Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, Lenny Kravitz and Gwen Stefani were all jammin' with the same band, it would be this one.

Fusing funk, reggae, hip-hop, and highlife, Soulfège is more than a band...it's a big FUNKY band.

Electrifying audiences, from Boston to Ghana and beyond, with its positive vibe and relentless groove, the members of Soulfège have performed with and for some of the world's most talented artists and distinguished dignitaries, including Debbie Allen, Janet Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Bobby McFerrin, Nelson Mandela, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Dr. Cornell West, and Al Gore.

The group is known for building sonic bridges that fuse the influences of the African Diaspora into a musical vision all its own. Soulfège not only shines with creativity, it thrills audiences with a golden foundation in rhythm and harmony.

In general, the band tries to present a positive view of life and of culture, both American and African. Frontman Derrick N. Ashong, who is from Ghana, told The Boston Globe the band "was in a position to help change misperceptions on both sides." Says Daniel T. Swann of the Globe:

Soulfege has one foot in Africa, one in America. Its core members -- Ashong, Jonathan M. Gramling, and Kelley Nicole Johnson -- were brought together by their alma mater, Harvard, where all had been in the Kuumba Singers, a gospel choir. But Ashong was born in Ghana, and many of the band's lyrics reflect a connection to the African diaspora. "Yaa (dis be fo radio)," for example, includes lyrics in Ga (spoken in Ghana), as well as in Portuguese and English.

Plenty of YouTube clips and other eye candy -- ear candy? -- on their website. Quotes from and links to the Globe's laudatory story on the band and the SMA tour.

Here's how Erin Jansen's NetLingo.com website defines sticky content:

Information or features on a Web site that gives users a compelling reason to revisit it frequently. Stickiness is also gauged by the amount of time spent at a Web site over a given period of time. This is often maximized by getting the user to leave some information behind on the site, such as a personal profile, an investment portfolio, a resume, a list of preferred cities for weather reports, personal horoscopes, birthday reminders, and the like.

How many sticky features do you see on the Soulfège website? How many do you see on NetLingo, for that matter?

COMM 337 -- final exam

COMM 337: Advanced Journalistic Writing
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

Final Examination – Due at 1:30 p.m., Wed., Dec. 5

The Principles of Journalism adopted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, available at http://www.journalism.org/, say telling the 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.” But words like truth tend to make working journalists nervous. So they tend not to use them. In her autobiographical book “Small Blessings,” Celestine Sibley of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said “newspapering is dedicated to something important – letting the people know.” Sibley, who covered courts, the legislature and major stories like the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, said she did it once with “a straightforward recital of the facts, devoid of feeling” (170-172). The story won a prize. And Donald Murray, author of our textbook “Writing to Deadline,” recalled his first prize-winning story, about a suicidal jumper on a window ledge: “I followed the specific detail – the terrifying chant of the crowd [‘Jump! Jump!’ Jump!’]. … I wrote the story with information – specific, revealing details and direct quotations. I didn’t attempt ‘great’ writing, I just tried to get out of the way of the horrifying information” (6). Murray, like Sibley, doesn’t use the word truth. Instead, he speaks of specific details, details and facts.

“I was told [as a reporter] and then learned by public attack and embarrassment that it was worse to spell the name wrong than to charge a person with public lewdness,” Murray adds. “If you got the name of the street wrong, no one trusted anything in the story.” So telling the truth is about getting the facts straight and presenting them to readers with enough context so they can understand them. Write a 1,000- to 1,500-word essay answering these questions:
How important is truthfulness to journalistic ethics? How do Don Murray's recommended reporting techniques, like seeking out surprise or avoiding clichés of vision, and his techniques for telling a story -- finding the “line,” explaining context and organizing a story around a clear narrative – help us get the facts straight and communicate them to our readers? How can they help you in your own writing?

What do other working journalists, or former journalists like Robert Fisk of The [London] Independent and those on the HBO show “The Wire” profiled in The New Yorker, have to say about finding and telling the truth? How can this help you in your own writing?
In reporting and writing your feature stories for Communications 337, what did you learn about interviewing people, getting the facts straight, understanding them in context and putting it all into words on paper (or pixels on a screen) so a reader could understand them? How can it help you as a professional writer?

COMM 337: Quote w/in quote w/in quote

Posted to my mass communications blogs. --pe

The CNN story was headlined "Why bad kissers don't get to second base." Cute enough. Worth a look. But what I really liked about it was the punctuation in the last 'graph! Take a look:

"The best kisses are always the ones that happen accidentally," observes New York City resident Benjamin Kayne, 25, a digital media sales director. "(Planned kisses) are just tedious, and I'm sitting there thinking, 'Is this over yet? The commercial is over and I'm missing "CSI".' "

That's a quote within a quote within a quote. That you don't see every day.

COMM 337: How much extra credit ... ?

... should I give you if you cite the article linked below in your final exam for COMM 337?

Email me and let me know what you think. That way I'll know you visited the website during final exam week, even if you don't quote the article linked below in your essay on truth, facts and the responsiblities of a journalist.

But I think you'll find something to think about.

It's an opinion piece in today's New York Times by Clark Hoyt, the "readers' representative" columnist for The Times. Headline is "Fact and Fiction on the Campaign Trail." Interested yet? Facts.

Well, try this. Hoyt's lede:

LAST Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.

“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.

In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.

If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.

OK, OK, a couple of political candidates trashing each other. Happens all the time. But I columnist for The New York Times saying his paper let him down? Now that is news.

No. It's not news, it's ethics.

So who's telling the truth? Says Hoyt:

My colleague Michael McElroy came up with the facts that morning after a 10-minute check of F.B.I. statistics readily available on the Internet. Murder in Massachusetts did go up in the four years Romney was governor, from 173 in 2002, the year before he took office, to 186 in 2006, the last full year of his term. An increase of 13 murders may not seem like a crime wave in a state with a population of 6.4 million, but an increase is an increase, so Giuliani was right on that point.

But violent crime, a broader category made up of murder, rape, robbery and assault, went down in the Romney era, from 31,137 to 28,775, so Giuliani was wrong on that score and the Romney campaign was right, though it failed to mention that robberies had also increased.

Both of them. Neither one of them.

Getting the facts in context is a little harder. Ten minutes harder, to be precise. How difficult can that be?

Something else. Hoyt quotes people who say fact-checking can have a good effect on the political process, and several news organizations in fact (there's that word again) do a lot of it:

Fact-checking the candidates has long been an important part of campaign coverage. When news organizations blow the whistle on false statements by candidates, it tends to have an impact, said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “I think it’s an extremely valuable role, keeping the players honest.”

Is that worth 10 minutes of a reporter's time?