Dear 186 students,

I hope you all had a nice holiday and that you've been productive working on your web features. Today is November 29 and they are due for workshopping and instructor feedback.

You must save these features as Word documents (Word will support links and pictures) and be able to access them from the classroom computers. The easiest way to do this is to e-mail the document to yourself and to me, which is how you should turn in your drafts.

Remember, do NOT post your features to your blogs just yet. You'll post only the final revision, next week.

Please come to class on time and ready to work with your peers! Late drafts will result in points deducted from the final semester project grade.

Please E-mail Pitch Letters

Dear students, many of you have e-mailed your pitch letters but in case you handed them in on paper, please now e-mail it to me as well. I absentmindedly left them in a folder that did not get packed for my holiday travels. (Ever hear of the absentminded professor? Well, now you have!)

Thank you and please have a nice day off.

Lululemon Ludicrousness

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stewart-j-lawrence/when-yogis-kill-the-grisl_b_1077457.html

Due Thursday for Class Teach-In

Several of you were absent and missed a) pitch-letter workshopping session and b) a research session. Remember, absences and tardiness will be reflected in your grade. (You also missed your instructor a little sleep-deprived after staying up most of the night watching livestreaming video from the Occupy Wall Street raid. See twitter posts.)

Your assignment for Thursday is to crack open Journalism Next and pick one of the following three chapters.

Chapter 5 GOING MOBILE

Chapter 9: DATA DRIVEN JOURNALISM

Chapter 11 BUILDING A DIGITAL AUDIENCE FOR NEWS

Read chapter and note the most important points and most compelling examples. Be ready to "teach" the chapter to your peers. Also write a blog post summarizing the chapter. As always, think about the lede, add something personal, see if you can incorporate a link or picture or both. And remember to cite the book/author.

Assignment Due Tues: Pitch Letter

You may want to keep blogging after this class, or you may want to try to publish on someone else's blog (often they accept "guest posts") or on a professional web site. To do either you need to communicate your ideas to an editor, and to do that you write a pitch letter, proposing a story idea or blog post.

Pitch letters are short, usually between 250 and 500 words. But they must work very hard. You need to sell yourself and your story with this letter. It must grab the editor's attention, show that you can write, give the editor a snapshot of the story, demonstrate the story's relevance to the site's readers, and persuade that you are qualified to write this.

Think of the pitch letter as answering these five questions (that will inevitably be asked by the editor):

• What is the story?

• Why should we publish it?

• How are you going to tell it?

• Who are you?

• Why are you the one to write it?

Like stories themselves, pitch letters have “leads” that serve the same function: to grab the reader's attention and get them to keep reading. One trick of pitch letter writing is to begin the pitch as you would the story.

Your assignment is to pitch your web feature (semester project) story, as if I'm the editor and the publication is Pima186. Print it out and bring it to class Tuesday.

Here's a sample outline:

Dear ____________ (always address to a specific editor).

Lede graph: Exactly like you'd write the lede to the story itself.

Idea graph: Quickly explain the larger story and its significance. Include any helpful statistics, recent news, any relevant links. Justify why this story belongs on this blog/site.

Sources graph: Demonstrate that you've done some research and have access to sources willing to be quoted, include any reporting ideas you have for the story.

About me graph: Who are you, where have you published (you can all say you have been writing on your own blog!), and why are you qualified to write this piece?

Ask graph: Ask if the editor is interested. If there are any dates or deadlines, mention them ("Would PimaWriting be interested in this story? The event is this Wednesday.")

Thanks for considering/Sincerely/Best,

Your name
contact info
blog/web site address if you have one

links to clips if you have them. (A clip is a published example of your work)

Calling All Twitizens to the Twitterverse

It's time to tweet.

Here's a really basic intro to Twitter for individual users:

http://www.commoncraft.com/video/twitter


Media expert Deanna Zandt offers some great guides for signing up:

http://www.deannazandt.com/twitter-guides/

And now, the writers who have tried to make sense of it:

• An article from Time magazine from 2009 by author Steven Johnson--more of a THING feature.

• And more of an IDEA feature (or "think piece) from the New York Times magazine about "digital intimacy," by tech columnist Clive Thompson.

Pop Survey Says...

On Thursday I asked the class for some feedback on what we'd covered so far, what else you'd like to have covered, and whether you find reading and analyzing articles in class helpful. Here are the results (out of 9 students present):

Out of the items on the “Building Blocks of Stories” handout (please grab it if you missed class—I've uploaded it to the course page FILES section), there are votes to review:

Nut graphs (1)

emotional connection (1)

Quotes/interviewing (1)

leads & conclusions (1)

anecdotes (1)

scenes (1)

research/facts (2)

There's interest in the business of freelance journalism and using social media to increase readership of your blogs. We are going to spend next week on the business side and work on pitch letters. And this week we are going to get Twitterized. And I think we'll also spend some class time on research. (As for the rest, maybe the students who were absent can break the tie)

Eight out of nine of you enjoy reading features in class and would like to read more in the remaining class time. Several of you said that it allows you to read stories you wouldn't read otherwise, and to learn from the writing techniques. Others said you've enjoyed being introduced to a wide variety of web sites. One criticism was that it's too easy to get off topic. Thus, we will be reading a couple more articles together, but we'll try not to follow any tangents too far.

There's also some interest in having more “conference” time with me regarding your blogs. I am willing to meet with students before or after class so please e-mail me for an appointment if you'd like some additional feedback.

p.s. We also figured out that it IS possible for you to comment on the blogs, but for some reason you have to log out and log back in each time. So if those of you who were absent would like to weigh in publicly, go ahead an comment below. If not, you may write your feedback down and hand it in to me like the others did.

THANK YOU for filling out the "survey"!

Metallica & Lou Reed

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/10/lars-ulrich-metallica-lou-reed-question-answer

Stanley Tucci Q&A

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/10/q-a--stanley-tucci-on--i-margin-call--i---failing-algebra--and-w

Assignment: The Paragraph Profile

I'm quoting from Jacqui Banaszynski's "Profiles" essay in the book Telling True Stories:

Paragraph Profile
The shortest of profiles aren't really profiles at all but single paragraphs within larger stories. A paragraph profile transforms a fairly flat story into one with real characters. It helps your readers move through the story because names are no longer merely names. The paragraph profile reveals something about a person's character that is germane to the broader story.

While writing the most mundane beat stories, paragraph profiles allow you to push yourself to do the kind of reporting required for narrative writing. They force you to dig deeper and focus on what is truly relevant about the subject.

In class assignment: Look back over an article we've read in class (scan my blog for links if you need to) and find examples of paragraph profiles. HOMEWORK assignment: Write a paragraph profile of one of the people you've interviewed for your feature. If you need to, call or e-mail them with follow up questions. This is not for your blog; type it on paper.