Magazine cover information.

The written component of your mock magazine cover should address the following:

1. What is the focus of your magazine? Is it special or general interest?
2. What kinds of visuals did you use? Why?
3. What kind of layout did you use? Why?
4. What kind(s) of article will be included inside this mock magazine, according to your cover?
5. What audience are you targeting here? How do you think you have appealed to that audience?

Make the response follow the normal format. There is no length requirement; the response needs simply to be long enough to answer the above five questions.

Seminar information.

The following is an overview of how you must approach each remaining seminar (assuming you are not leading it).

Remaining seminars

See calendar.

New format

Each seminar must be followed by a written and graded response. It needs to be formatted, but it doesn’t need to be much longer than a page. The responses will be holistically graded and depend entirely on participation in the seminar and attention to the seminar leader.
This should help with absences, inattention and grades.
If absent on the day of a seminar, a student must do a report on the subject of the seminar to replace the response paper. Again, this will be no longer than a page (or two), but this one will be graded holistically according to accuracy and presentation of information.

The responses are due together in two separate collections. The first collection of five responses is due on December 17 (or thereabouts).

The first seminar: Friday, November 16

If you were absent on Friday, November 16, the seminar led by Taryn and Monica focused on the differences between special interest and general interest magazines. Your response, if you were absent, should attempt to explain the differences between a specific special interest magazine and a specific general interest magazine that you own or borrow from the school library.

In the future, the subject and an overview of each seminar will be posted online for absent students to read.

Important links and information.

The first link here is to a calendar that outlines the rest of the semester in Media Studies. The second link is to the rubric that will be used to assess your magazine covers, which are due on November 27.

Calendar

Magazine rubric

You have one additional assignment to complete before Wednesday, 11/21: If you did not post to your blog over the weekend (between 11/16-11/18), add a new entry. Continue to follow your blog's focus. This is a simple y/n grade worth 25 points.

Newspaper article deadline.

Update: The article you began at the end of the week is due on Wednesday, November 7. You may turn it in tomorrow, but you may also take the extra two days to finalize it. Remember to adhere to the guidelines.

Newspaper writing: 11/1-11/2.

Your assigned style is in the post below this one; this post contains the article assignment itself.

Your task:

Create an article in the style of a given newspaper era. Choose as a subject a significant event related to the focus of your blog. (I will help you with this in class.) It can be historical or recent, but it must be true; you must do some research for this assignment.

The article itself?

-250 words or more (no maximum)
-an effective headline
-an effective lead
-factual information
-stylistic markers (which I will explain more in class)

You may earn a few bonus points for using a picture that is both appropriate and appropriately captioned.

You may lose a few points for not taking the time to format this article so that it looks engaging -- a bit more like a newspaper and less like something you vomited onto the screen in between not doing your work.

Try to have fun with this. It's due on Monday, November 5; however, I will be grading you on what you do during the next two days.

Newspaper writing: 11/1-11/2.

For the next two days, you are writing a newspaper article in the style you were assigned. Below is the list:

Yellow journalism: Danielle, Nikki, Anne
Objective journalism: Chris Grady, AJ, Chaim, Carlos
Interpretive journalism: Lyndsey, Chris Kopec, Jill
Advocacy journalism: Monica, Kate, Taryn
Literary journalism: Kaitlin, Lauren, Alex
Gonzo journalism: Maegan, Ethan, Clare

If you need to look at the lecture notes -- or anything else from the last week or so -- it is located at my school website, under References and under your class.

Complete me.

Today in this computer lab, you are to complete an assignment similar to the one you completed yesterday.

(If you were absent, you will need to come in after school today or before school tomorrow to complete the print portion of this work.)

Visit each of the websites in the list that follows this assignment. They correspond to the papers we examined yesterday in class. For each site, spend some time scrolling through the front page. You're going to stay here for a while, looking at how these online papers differ from their printed counterparts. When you answer the following questions, be sure to keep those printed papers in the back of your mind.

1. What is the most prominently featured story on the main page?
2. How is the main page constructed? Is it busy, simple, filled with photographs, rotating stories?
3. What kinds of photographs are visible when you first visit the site? Describe them and their effects.
4. How easy is it to navigate the site? List the sections of the paper on the menu bar.
5. Is the audience for the online site the same audience you inferred from the printed papers?
6. What are the biggest differences you see between the two versions (printed and online)?

Be prepared to discuss both the online and printed versions of the NY papers tomorrow in class.

Here's the list:

New York Post
The Daily News
The New York Times
And because it's the world's only reliable newspaper: The Weekly World News

You must also read and/or print the newspaper background that is in one of the posts below this one. I will remind you in class about this.

Remember me.

Here is a master list of your assignments as of Wednesday, October 24:

- Newspaper comparisons (print and online) due on THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25
- Reading (newspaper background) due on FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26
- Susan Sontag article and questions due on MONDAY, OCTOBER 29
- Questions for guest speaker due on MONDAY, OCTOBER 29
- Op/Ed and SOAPS due on WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31
- Newspaper article due on MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5

Print me.

Well, not the post itself. Print this:

Newspapers and the Rise of Modern Journalism

Read this on your own. We'll review some of the material in class over the next few days.

Lead.

This is so I can find it later, when I go to show you examples of effective leads in newspaper articles:

Calif. wildfires burn scores of homes

Post-script to Op/Ed assignment.

In the previous post, I gave you a list of reputable newspapers from which you may draw your opinion or editorial article. Stick to that list. We looked at The Huffington Post today, and it's true that it features virtually nothing but opinion and editorial; however, it isn't associated with a newspaper of any kind, which defeats one of the purposes for which you will ultimately use your SOAPS analysis.