First Day of School

Today, spring semester begins at Grossmont College, and this blog is addressed to students attending the first day of my news writing classes. If you are a general visitor to the blog, and you want to know how the first day of a beginning journalism class looks like to a student, read on.

Students: Sorry I can’t be with you this week, but I am in the third week of recovery from hip replacement surgery and I am not mobile enough yet to get to class. I hope to join you next week and think I will be ready. If not, we will continue to meet here and go forward with our work.

This semester, you will study fundamentals of news writing for media, both print and broadcast. The class text is “The Complete Reporter” (Harris-Leiter Johnson), seventh edition. The first half of the semester, you will learn to write news stories for newspapers. The second half of the semester, you will learn to write news stories for television. The two types of stories are very different, yet very much alike. At the end of the semester, in newscast teams of three, you will produce scripts for a studio newscast and tape the newscast in collaboration with the video production class, in our television studio downstairs.

You will find writing stories for print to be unusual, even strange. That is because your demographic doesn’t read newspapers as a rule, and so you are not familiar with the “rhythm” of writing for print. You will find writing for television much easier, because you get most of your news from broadcast, whose story rhythms are quite familiar to you.

You must be able to write solid stories both for print (the 3,000-word version) and for broadcast (the 30-second version), because in the new digital media age, you will always be writing both. Even now, before the convergence of print and broadcast is complete, you will watch a 30-second story on television, then be advised: “For more about this story, go to our Website at cnn.com” (or “cbs.com,” nbc.com,” “10news.com,” whatever). The same reporter wrote both the 30-second and the “for more about” versions of the story. In this class, you will learn to do both, and you will be very valuable in the new digital media industry.

Both print and broadcast news stories begin with analysis of raw information. Is there a news story in that raw information? If so, what kind of story is it? You will learn how to answer those questions. Then you will learn how to organize the information into a good story, and then write the story in standard news style.

In class, you should have received materials (class schedule, etc.) from my sub instructor. The most important document is the Toolbox. This is a collection of tools that journalists use to do their work. With the Toolbox, you will be able to analyze and organize raw information.

Your first assignment is to start memorizing the Toolbox: the Cardinal Rules, the Three Priorities, the Definition of News, the Five W’s, the 12 News Values, the Narrative Style, the Inverted Pyramid, the Five Steps, the Purpose of the Lede, the Four C’s, Simple vs. Complex Stories, Types of Complex Stories, The Nine Dots and the Iceberg Theory. You must memorize the Toolbox in order: in other words, the Second Priority is Content; the First W is Who; the Fourth W is Where; the Second News Value is Progress; the Seventh News Value is Timeliness, and so on. If you know the Toolbox, and how to use it, you will make an A in this class; there’s no way I can stop you.

Your second assignment, due Wednesday for MW and Thursday for TTh, is to imagine you are a reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune. In class you were given the raw information for a story about “Moore.” Write the story for the morning Union-Tribune. Use Word or WP, standard margins, double-spaced. Most of you will get the story right, even on the first day of class, for this simple reason: you already know what the tools of journalism are. They weren’t invented by the media; they were created by people just like you, living thousands of years before the media even existed. Without my teaching you anything, you already know instinctively what the news is. Turn in your stories Wednesday or Thursday, and the instructor will pass them on to me.

That’s all for today. Now please find “Links” in the left column and send me an email at “Contact Me,” confirming you have read this material. Confirmation is mandatory. If you have any questions about the above, include them in your email. I look forward to working with you this semester.