Introduction
This senior-level course will require you to practice everything you've learned about journalism so far, and apply it to a project that you will define, execute and publish. The purpose is to help you become a skilled, thoughtful and collaborative online journalist. The course assumes you have basic reporting and editing skills and are ready to apply your talents to learning and creating new forms of online journalism. Please note: This will require a substantial commitment of energy, time and focus.
My hope is that this class will inspire your imagination and encourage you to actively participate in shaping your own career and contributing in positive ways to the ongoing transformation of journalism.
Prerequisites: Jour 204 and Jour 310
Learning Objectives
- Demonstrate basic competency in HTML and CSS so that you can troubleshoot easily fixed problems in Web authoring programs and content management systems.
- Produce short, accurate, meaningful presentations of information customized for the Web, using text, photographs, audio and video.
- Practice critiquing, prototyping and storyboarding nonlinear narrative stories.
- Demonstrate competency in designing and incorporating interactivity in your journalism.
- Develop a high level of proficiency in at least one form of online journalism (blogging, multimedia storytelling, visual design, curation, mapping, databases).
- Define, compile and organize information about a complex public issue using RSS, Twitter, social networking and more traditional forms of information gathering.
- Collaborate with other students to produce journalism that attracts a public audience.
- Create an online identity for yourself suitable for presenting to professional organizations.
Course organization
The first three weeks will be devoted to technical workshops, discussions of forms of online journalism, and an introduction to critical issues facing Nevada. Weeks four through 15 will be organized as a collaborative newsroom, with class sessions devoted to providing the information you need to be successful in your individual and team projects.
Projects
You will have ten weeks to produce a body of journalism that you would be proud to include in a professional portfolio. This is your opportunity to specialize: both in terms of an issue and type of journalism. A project proposal is due the third week of the semester and can be submitted by teams or individuals. Some possibilities:
- Nevada is facing the gravest budget crisis it has experienced in decades. The higher education system is facing a 35% cut in funding. A team of students could cover this crisis, developing a Web site that includes up-to-date, easily accessed information about budget negotiations. The site could include beat blogs by each student on the team, focusing on specific issues in the budget, as well as interactive components to encourage discussion and participation.
- Homelessness in northern Nevada continues to be an economic and social problem with grave consequences. A student or a team could continue reporting on the homeless in Nevada as started by last year's students, developing multimedia packages suitable for pitching to Nevada's news media. (See last year's blog and site.)
- Individual students could define issues of particular interest and develop an interactive online resource guide targeted to a specific community of geography or interests.
- One or two students could focus on Journalism Week, doing advance preparation, covering it live and then producing an indepth site to follow-up on the speakers and issues raised during the week.
Class Blog
This is a highly collaborative class, the success of which depends on the engagement of all of us. We will keep a class blog for sharing ideas, resources, last minute class notes, readings and other items. You are all registered as users so feel free to add a welcome message and any initial questions/ideas for the class: Journalism 453 Class blog.