Class Agenda

Announcements

Draft of story #2 due next Wednesday, April 5.

Final draft of story #2 due April 19 (the first day back from break), along with your pitches for your final project.

Final project assignment: Same general idea as your first two stories: non-medium-specific story within your beat (if written, it should be about 800 words; if photo, somewhere between 12-20 photos with strong, multi-sentence captions; if video, it should be an edited two- to three-minute project; if radio, it should be roughly a three- to four-minute narrated story) except that there should be one additional multimedia element.

This means that, like with your first two stories, there should be at least one photo, but there should also be some kind of audio or video component to go along with it. This isn’t a multimedia class so these additional elements don’t need to be the kind of elaborate or ambitious audio/video pieces that could be a standalone story; they just need to complement your story. It could be a simple 30- or 60-second clip of one of your sources talking, for instance—maybe going into more detail about something you touched on in your story.

Friday UN trip – please confirm!

Yahkiney Lynch
Candice McLeggan
Megan Guard
Amberley Canegitta
Ruonan Zheng
Anna Poslusny
Gabby Tjahyadukarta
Rebecca Simon
Tafannum Rahman
Maria Markowicz
Dylan Diaz
Junior Martinez
Peter Rodriguez

UN assignment

Write a short blog post for the class site by class time on Monday. Pick one of the topics the spokesman decided to weigh in on today and do a bit of research into the backstory. Sum up the situation in two or three brief paragraphs and include links to two or three stories that have been published about it. Tell me, according to your best news judgment, whether the spokesman’s comments were newsworthy enough to quote in a story if you were covering it yourself. Why or why not?

Full texts of briefings can be found here: https://www.un.org/press/en/content/noon-briefings

If you do not come to one of the briefings, your assignment is similar except that instead of a short blog post, I want you to actually write a 400-word breaking news story on one of the topics that is covered in a briefing this week, quoting the spokesman as well as two or three other official or high-profile sources. (Twitter is a good source for this—you can even embed Twitter posts in your story, write it as a sort of timeline where you aggregate posts as the story develops.)

Using Twitter as a journalist: Great for breaking stories and finding sources, although you have to be really careful to do your due diligence. Also these days a great way to raise your profile/brand, especially if you’re a freelancer. And finally, a way to get the news out directly in a different medium, like Rukmini Callimachi. Be careful—because you can definitely expose yourself to criticism!

A recent great example of “international” reporting in NYC: https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-03-17/child-brides-are-little-known-problem-america-today