Author Archives: Roz Bernstein

About Roz Bernstein

Journalism Faculty

Special Opportunity: January Classes at CUNY J School!

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Attention Feature Writing Class:
Here is a wonderful opportunity for January classes at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. The price for you is $15. But spaces are limited.
The CUNY J School would like to offer your students — CUNY undergraduate newspaper editors, broadcasters, and journalism majors (juniors and seniors only) — an opportunity to take classes in the January Academy.
Interested students need to email or call Steve Dougherty ASAP to get registered. His contact info is [email protected] or 646-758-7826.
The undergrad fee is only $15 per course, a highly discounted rate, and must be paid in advance by check.
Here’s the complete course list, though undergrads are not eligible to take the advanced skills classes. For example, they can’t take either of the News Photography sections with Jim Estrin or John Smock, but they could sit in on News Photography for Applicants.
 Steve Dougherty will let them know if we can honor their requests.

Blog Posts

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Dear Feature Writers,

Here, as requested, are the blog posts required for the class:

Neighborhood Faces Query

Neighborhood Faces Story (with audio)

Backgrounder on Your Neighborhood

Small Business Query

Small Business Story (with slideshow)

Community Service Query

Community Service Story (with some multimedia)

Conflict Story query

Conflict Story (with some multimedia)

Katherine Vaz Post (including Our Lady of the Artichokes)

Joseph Mitchell Post

A. J. Liebling Post

Post on Sheri Fink Memorial Article

There may be one or two additional ones on readings.

Reporter’s Notes on Your Neighborhood (at least 5 posts and 5 comments)

Prof. B.

Class Update

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Dear Feature Writers,

Just so we are all up-to-date, let me give you all the revised schedule for our class:

1. The community services story is now due on November 20th. We will discuss ideas in class tomorrow. I understand that Hurricane Sandy has really had an effect on our work. Extensions are possible and we have discussed having the final conflict story focus on the ways your community dealt with the hurricane.

2. Please make sure that you give me a hard copy of your Neighborhood Faces and Neighborhood Business story if you have not yet already done so. I need hard copies for grading purposes.

See you on Thursday, November 8th.

 

Welcome Back!

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Hi Everyone!

Looking forward to seeing you all on Tuesday! We will have much to talk about following Hurricane Sandy. Not to worry about deadlines. We will be changing the deadline for the Community Services story and I also have an idea for our final conflict story, too. Perhaps all of the neighborhood conflict stories should deal with how your neighborhood handled Hurricane Sandy. What worked and what didn’t work? Let’s discuss this when we meet next.

Prof. B.

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Dear Feature Writers,

Here is some additional advice for uploading photos:

The students need to re-size each image to optimize them for the web before uploading, rather than uploading them full-size and then resizing them using WordPress. I usually suggest resizing them in PhotoShop, Preview (Mac) or Paint (PC) so that the larger of the two dimensions is 800 px. That keeps the photos plenty big enough for any layout on the web while also making sure they don’t get close to the file size restriction.

Also, when you upload your final profile with photos and audio and are ready to make it public, make sure that it is no longer password protected.

A Message from Prof. Stephen Francoeur: On Using Census Data

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I had a little discussion with Prof. Francoeur after our workshop and he followed up with this email for you:

I’m not sure it may be worth the trouble for your students to get too hung up on finding Census data for the exact neighborhoods they are researching. I think the Census data for something that roughly approximates or includes the neighborhood is probably good enough to give you rough portrait of who lives there. If some part of the story you are researching turns on key demographic changes, then it might be worth doing a little extra digging. Let me give an example.

In my presentation, I mentioned that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I had heard that the number of children aged 0-5 had gone up dramatically in the past decade and that increase was one of the reasons why the elementary schools were so overcrowded. If I were in your class and decided to make my story tied to the crowded schools (or about the charter schools elbowing their way into public school spaces and how that was affecting the flow of new students into the district), then I probably would want to do the hard work of seeing exactly how the Census numbers had changed from 2000 to 2010. And I might also want to make sure that the numbers reflected the exact geographical area that I had in mind.

But I suspect that many of your students’ stories won’t require such detailed use of Census data. The “Community District Profiles” that can be found on the NYC.gov site that detail Census numbers for each of the 59 community board districts may be good enough for your class. While each community board might encompass two or more neighborhoods, they may provide a good enough yardstick for the needs of your class.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/lucds/cdstart.shtml

If anyone does want to dig deeper, though, I suggest that they schedule a research consultation with a librarian, which can be done with this form:
http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/help/forms/consultations.php

Stephen Francoeur
User Experience Librarian
Newman Library
Room 516
Baruch College
151 E. 25th Street
New York, NY 10010