Some professors ban laptops, tablets and smart phones from their classrooms, seeing them as distractions for their students. Instead, they should welcome them as tools for engagement.
Tags: #jem200, conduct a dialogue, hashtag, journalism student tweeting, live Twitter stream, tweeting the lecture, Twitter, writing for an audience
The speed of the Internet and the World Wide Web in disseminating information has forced editors and journalists to rethink the way they present news and the structure of writing.
Tags: acceleration of writing, accuracy, bullet points of information, CNN, highlights, inverted pyramid, mobile devices, mobile journalism, news, news story structure, newswriting, speed of writing for the web, Twitter, World Wide Web, writing, Writing for the Mass Media
The nation had just endured a bitter debate about whether or not it should go to war. The Japanese ended the debate on Dec. 7, 1941, but the attack on Pearl Harbor had not cleared away the bitterness. Franklin Roosevelt had to weigh his words carefully.
Tags: America First, Charles Lindbergh, conscription, date which will live in infamy, Dec. 7 1941, draft, Franklin Roosevelt, Gold Star Mothers, Grace Tully, Japanese invasion of America, Pearl Harbor, war in Eruope, Winston Churchill, World War II
How do you make an interactive chart like this one and put it onto your web page? The video on this page will explain it all.
Tags: charts and graphs, creating interactive charts with Google spreadsheets, free software for charts, getting a chart from data, Google, graphics journalism, informational graphics, interactive, video, Vimeo
Katie Couric is the latest media star to catch a glimpse of the future. That future is online.
Tags: All Things D, Andrea Peterson, Business Week, Claire Suddath, David Pogue, increasing importance of video, inexorable march to online, Kara Swisher, Katie Couric, Marissa Mayer, New York Times, on demand video, shift to online, Washington Post, Yahoo
A news website gives scholastic journalists the opportunity to do something they’ve never done — practice “daily journalism.”
Tags: audience, news website, post something new every day, scholastic journalism
r u goin 2 c her 2-nit Strict grammarians (I don’t count myself in those ranks) believe that text messaging will kill off good grammar, spelling and punctuation. (Unless it literally kills us first, since many text messages are sent and received from behind the wheel of vehicles at 45-plus mph.) But before we don • Read More »
To those who lived through it (including me), nothing is comparable to those four days in 1963 beginning on Nov. 22 when we heard the news that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Televisions all over America went on and stayed on through Monday night. We had never seen anything like it — wall-to-wall coverage of a news event.
Tags: Jackie Kennedy, JFK assassination, Marc Fisher, National Archives, television news, Walter Cronkite, Washington Post
Times are tough for the National Football League. Concussions, racism, criminality, strokes and heart attacks, harassment — the problems keep piling up. This weekend, things got a little worse.
Tags: boxing, ESPN, football, National Football League, NFL, Rick Reilly, Tom Boswell, Washington Post
Writing for the Mass Media will be a new edition — its 9th — next year. The new edition will maintain the same chapter outline (with some minor adjustments) as the 8th edition, but the material in the book will be expanded and updated. This new edition will be more closely tied to the book’s • Read More »
Tags: Allyn and Bacon, textbooks, writing, Writing for the Mass Media
Jakob Neilsen’s Nielsen Norman Group, web design researchers, has a critique of the site that is as enlightening as it is devastating. There are lessons in it for all of us who work with the web. The critique is written by Jen Cardello and says the website broke 10 usability guideline the NNG preaches over and over again.
Tags: Affordable Care Act, design, functionality, Kentucky, TalkingPointsMemo, websites
People who can write news — that is, those who can present it accurately, completely, precisely and efficiently — play a vital role in who we are. This week we will continue to discuss some of the conventions and customs of writing that you should apply to your MC102 assignments.
Tags: direct quotes, paraphrases, quotations, quotes
News is one of the things that holds society together. It is something we all use and share. News is what we have in common. Up to this point in the course, we have tried to emphasize and apply some of the basic tenants of good writing and to discuss what it means to write in a professional environment. This week, we begin to learn the various forms of writing for the mass media.
Tags: inverted pyramid, news, newswriting
For media writers — people who make their living in this profession, however, the rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation and style are essential. Knowing those rules and being able to apply them consciously to your writing is the mark of a professional. What you don’t know about these things, you should try to learn as quickly as possible.
Tags: grammar, punctuation, spelling, style
College of Communication and Information Sciences, University of Alabama Note: This course is no longer being taught at the University of Alabama. This web site is being maintained by JPROF.com because it may be of use to those who are teaching writing for the mass media or using the text, Writing for the Mass Media, • Read More »
Tags: courses, media writing
This exercise consists of 10 sentences. Re-type each sentence inserting commas in the correct locations. Print this out when you have finished or follow the directions of your instructor in completing this exercise. A link appears at the end of the sentences that gives an explanation for each sentence.
Advertisers at this year’s Super Bowl will spend $2.4 million to reach the 90 million people in the television audience for 30 seconds. That figure is up slightly from the $2.3 million they spent last year. Traditionally, the Super Bowl draws the single largest television audience of any show during the year.
Tags: Super Bowl
One of the most interesting and up-to-date people keeping up with the magazine world is Samir Husni — or, as he has tagged himself, Mr. Magazine. Husni is especially interested in monitoring magazine startup.
Tags: Mr. Magazine, Samir Husni