post by Meg about class on March 18th

Special thanks to Bryce Biederman for helping me take notes for the this post. The bullet points are taken directly from his notes.

Our class yesterday started with Prof. Lawrence inviting us to do two voluntary activities. One activity involves helping one of her students finish her Capstone project. In order to participate you would have to come to class early on the 25th, watch an old reality television show, then be interviewed as to what you saw. If you choose to do this activity and take notes while watching the show it would help you with a future writing assignment. The second voluntary activity is to go on a field trip to the Newseum on an upcoming weekend with another communications class, admission to the museum is free. For more specific details, and instructions regarding both activities please contact Prof. Lawrence.

Once class officially began we were given back our speech papers. Then we were introduced to broadcast journalism by listening to and analyzing a few select stories from National Public Radio. We discussed the use of sound bites to give the listeners sensory images to go along with the stories. We also talked about how easy it is for the point of a story's lead to get lost and for the story itself to become confusing simply because a person is listening to and not reading the story.

After that discussion we broke into groups of about six people to practice composing a radio news cast. Each member of the group wrote one 20 second story using stories from the Washington Post as a springboard. Since each story was 20 seconds long each story translated into five lines (not sentences) of text. Those groups who did not present in class will present next class.

Tips to remember when writing such stories.

• Triple space between the lines
• Don’t break for new paragraphs
• Include (in top right) the number of lines and the time (p. 216)
• Spell out dates
• Use numbers for 10 - 999
• Put attribution before what is said
• Remember to use transitions/Segways between stories (meanwhile, in other news, looking over seas, etc, etc)

This group project was designed to get us ready to do our next homework assignment. According to our syllabus this assignment is to "Write a two-minute radio broadcast( 30 lines) March 19-21. You may include national, international and local news, sports, entertainment, business and/or weather. You must have a mix of news stories." We should be prepared to have our newscasts timed as we read them aloud to the class. So make sure you practice reading your stories out loud several times before class.

We also need to read the review on pages 141 -- 142.

Next to Monday, March 22 the syllabus says news. quiz, so our remember to look at the Washington Post and the New York Times' websites that morning.