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.

Opinions and editorials.

One of your assignments as we study newspapers is to analyze an Op/Ed piece from a respectable newspaper. Here is the link to the assignment:

Op/Ed Assignment

The due date will be determined in class, but you'll have enough time to pick up newspapers from the stands, if you like. You can also obviously use the WWW, although you must be sure to follow the guidelines for the source and date range.

Here is a list of links to reputable newspapers' Op/Ed sections:

The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal
The LA Times
USA Today (Notice the URL - blogs, huh?)
The Washington Post (Registration required but free)
The Journal News

There are certainly others, but check with me before using them.

tvlinks.co.uk

This news comes from the UK, but the site was mentioned in our class:

Major pirate website shut down

We'll use this in class as the first newspaper article read for structure and pacing (including the effectiveness of what is called "the lead"), but it's also worth discussing the subject matter. After searching for more information on the arrest, I was able to find the following:

TV-Links.co.uk Raided, Owner Arrested: UPDATED

You should notice the general difference between the two presentations of the same story, but for the purposes of today's class, we're going to discuss

1. the lead, or opening paragraph, and

2. objectivity.

More if I see another article on this topic.

Photography continued.

Class,

I'm back. Please read the post below before reading this one, and keep in mind that while quasi-inclement weather may not be ideal for a fire drill, we would probably want fog, rain, and muck in an actual fire. You know, to help to put out the actual fire.

To continue your assignment:

If you are maintaining a blog about the baseball postseason, you will want to focus in on a "big" idea in that sport: steroid use, perhaps, or even the idea that baseball is our "national pasttime." If you are posting about small town news, you may try to find the ultimate representation of what it means to live in a small town.

Use Google, use your common sense, and be sure that the picture is both iconic... and, of course, appropriate for the ol' school building.

I will check these posts on Monday morning at 7 AM, when I arrive bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for another glorious day of educating the future of America.

-Mr. Eure

Photography assignments.

Class,

While you are in the computer lab today, you are still to give your attention to the seminar leaders, Anne and Lauren. They will be using the projector screen in the room to walk you through an activity.

Your first assignment today is to load a Word document, follow the seminar, and complete the assignment given to you.

Your second assignment (for this week's blog) is to post a fifth time. You must find a photography that fits the theme of your blog and the elements discussed in the seminar on Thursday and Friday -- i.e., you are to locate an iconic photograph that fits your subject -- and add it in the body of your post. Next, you are to write at least two paragraphs:

1. describing and personally reacting to the photo
2. explaining why this is an iconic photo for your blog's subject matter

If you have been keeping a blog about nutrition, you will want to settle on something "big" (read: significant, cultural, time-sensitive) that has happened in nutrition, with fast food restaurants, with the general health of America...

... and I can't believe that we have another fire drill. Back in a minute.

As you blog this weekend...

Shoot for the moon, right? Even if you miss, you'll land among the silent, cold vacuum of space.

Your blogging could bring in revenue if you attract enough attention to yourself. Eric Nakagawa, the Patient Zero of the lolcats meme (see the previous post), did just that.

Content creators and piracy.

This article discuss (and links to) another article about the threat of obscurity to content creators. Look for the following:

Who are "content creators"?

What does "obscurity" mean here?

What does "ubiquity" mean here?

What is piracy?

Why would obscurity threaten artists (e.g., musicians and film makers) more than piracy?

Memes: October 4.

There are hundreds of examples of memetic information on the Internet. Many of them are hilarious; others, disturbing; some, a little of both. We're looking at some of the more popular examples as we try to extrapolate a theory about what becomes popular and why it does.

First, let's look at the case study from earlier in the week again. We'll discuss why a site like the one created by this author only lasts a certain amount of time (memetically dies out) and why others -- the one below, for example -- seem to be gaining in strength with time.

Lolcats
- The original site
- The original picture (Patient Zero)
- A great article in The Wall Street Journal about the memetic longevity of lolcats

All Your Base Are Belong to Us
- Time article
- USA Today: Why would a line from an old game suddenly catch on? Who knows?"One of the great things about the Internet is it creates this," Schatz says. "Somebody grabs something out of the past and turns it into a phenomenon."

The Tourist Guy
- Debunked

Chuck Norris Facts
- Chuck Norris (possibly) not identifying irony when he sees it

Christopher Walken for President*

Bert Is Evil
- Life imitates art (and another article on this)

Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain

Badger Badger Badger

The Hamster Dance (original)

The Hamster Dance (nowadays)

Dancing Banana / Peanut Butter Jelly Time
- The interesting thing here is that the school server recognizese an attempt to view this animation as an attempt to view "Pornography/Adult Content" or something "Obscene/Tasteless." Remember that this is an animation of a dancing banana singing, "Peanut butter jelly time!" And remember that censorship is often clumsy.

*I bought this one. Completely bought it. I was ready to sign up to get the guy elected, and it in an only slightly ironic way.

Memetic fame, here we come!

Kids,

For your blog this week, you simply need to update with a third post. Next week, we will introduce commenting; the article hyperlinked in the post below this one is required by that time (but not now, so quitcher worrying).

For now, let's read about memes, Internet phenomena, and why it's not a good idea to leave embarassing video footage lying around -- metaphorically speaking or not.

Start here:

The Meme Epidemic: A Case Study

Trust me; even if you don't understand everything here, you will pick up enough background for our purposes.

Now to the Brits:

It's all in the memes

Read that article, too. Remember, if you don't understand the concept behind this information, it doesn't matter how funny a guy lip-synching to Romanian pop is.

Now let's look at a few repositories of information and a couple of websites devoted to tracking memetic developments on the Web.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Internet memes. It gives us a working vocabulary for types, although we'll add a few over the next few days.

Here is a site that actually lets us vote memes into existence: MemeVote.com. Take a look at what's on here.

Finally, the best site for current Internet trends in this regard (although it only tracks viral videos, those are the most prominent kind of meme in play nowadays): Viral Video Chart. This site tracks the number of views, links, and so on; notice what's popular right now, and we'll begin to discuss what it is that makes a video more viral than others.

In class, we will watch the most popular viral videos of all time, discuss their contents, and try to extrapolate a theory about this kind of popularity. We will look at trends, but we will also discuss how we -- as a class -- might create and propagate our own Internet meme.

Get to reading,

Mr. Eure

Fame and fortune.

The following article is a supplement to your semester blogs. You are to read it before the end of this week, when you will be asked to comment on a few classmates' blogs.

All-Stars of the Clever Riposte