Chapter 8 Test

(Instructions: Email me your answer to this essay before the beginning of class on the day of the final exam for Journlaism 61. You DO NOT need to post the answer on your blog. Just send it to me via email).

Essay question: How will media convergence transform the newsroom of the future? Give specific examples in your essay of how this will happen.

Chapter 9: Broadcasting Study Guide

You need to be familiar with the 10 key differences between writing for broadcast and writing for print including the need to be more conversational and friendlier in your tone for broadcast than you would for print.

Understand the reason that broadcast puts attribution before assertion and what that term means.

Why are crime stories the bread and butter of TV broadcast news?

Be able to give examples of how broadcast is written for the ear and not the eye.

Be familiar with the technical terms used in TV such as voice-over, B-roll, anchor, talent, etc.

You should also know the meaning of such common terms as toss, tease, cut, out-cue, sound bite and reader.

Why is broadcast news written in the All-CAPS format?

Be prepared to write a broadcast script in the proper format so that it looks like a professional broadcast script.

How long is the average TV broadcast news story?

(Ignore the section on radio broadcasting for this test. We will focus on TV news).

Another student broadcast

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyVoGpi9KNs&feature=youtu.be

Student broadcast example

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSO2tO0yERE

J 61 Newswriting Final Spring 2013

Background info: The famous San Francisco corner of Haight Ashbury is synonymous with hippies, drugs and the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. This unique neighborhood celebrates its counterculture history every year with a street fair that draws a unique crowd of tourists, hippies, businessmen, hookers and any and everyone else you can imagine. This year’s Haight Ashbury Street Fair will be held June 9, 2013.

Your final will be a two-part assignment related to this street fair.

Part 1: Write a press release promoting this event. Imagine you work for one of the vendors sponsoring the fair. Write a descriptive, colorful press release capturing the flavor of what makes Haight Ashbury one of the most celebrated neighborhoods in the world.

Part 2: Produce a one-minute news broadcast and write a TV news broadcast script on this unique event. The video will be aired before the event so you will need to talk about the event giving the viewer an appreciation of why Haight Ashbury is so special. You will also need to include basic information such as the date, time and location of the event – information people will need who might want to attend. Incorporate images or video from the Internet that will symbolize this iconic neighborhood. The video needs to be one minute long and posted on YouTube. You need to follow your broadcast script in your video. Stick closely to the script and time your broadcast. The closer your video sticks to the one-minute time limit the better.

Grading: It will be based on the quality of the writing in your press release and your TV broadcast script. The video will be graded on professional broadcast journalism standards based on the video’s creativity, your professionalism and your ability to deliver valuable information within the confines of one minutes. It’s important to stay as close as possible to the one-minute time frame.

Deadline: The video, broadcast script and press release deadline is Tuesday May 7 at the beginning of class. See the website www.haightashburystreetfair.org for additional information.

First person column example

This Chris Erskine column on running his first marathon is a great example of writing a column based on a personal experience. Erskine deftly combines humor with a poignant remembrance of the friend who inspired him to run this marathon. Read this column and look for references of how Erskine feels about his marathon experience. Also look for descriptive references in the column.

Lots of good reasons I shouldn't be doing this. I'm not even a little bit Kenyan. I've undertrained. After an hour, we haven't really even left downtown and appear to be circling back to where we started, Dodger Stadium.

This is my first marathon. And my last.

I was intrigued by the idea of running from the "stadium to the sea," and charmed that it was to happen on St. Patrick's Day, a convergence of pain and pleasure that only the Irish could admire.

Ninety minutes in, my legs feel like Roman candles and I still don't have a beer in hand.

I am with 24,000 other silly souls, dressed in our underwear, through a part of town so tough they even tattoo the cars.

There are port-o-potties everywhere, but never enough, and the lines are 10 deep. Thwack-thwack-thwack go the plastic doors. Thwack-thwack-thwaaaack. And the lines get no shorter.

At one point, I duck into a bar that hasn't even opened (Thanks, Oscar). I consider spending the day there, locked in the loo, which is a better fate than what awaits me back on the streets.

Yet, onward I go.

I have run a lot of races, but never one this far, 26.2 miles, an average of 40,000 steps, they say.

If you've never run such a race, let me give you a little perspective: Imagine running a 5K, which takes a fit runner 15 to 20 minutes and leaves him or her pretty gassed. Now add five hours to that.

That's a marathon.

How the winners complete this in a little more than two hours boggles the mind — that's just showing off.

A two-hour marathon is, to me, the equivalent of dunking on a 15-foot basket. Of sprinting the 40 in 2.3 seconds.

I'm doing this impossible task in honor of my late buddy Rhymer, raising money to fight the cancer that consumed him, sponsored by a bunch of our knucklehead friends who miss him — like me — more than even an Irish poet could describe.

Miss the guy for a hundred reasons, but especially on days like this, when I want to call him from the course and describe the running Elvises, or the drag queens lining Sunset, or that wonder woman, Julie Weiss, who has run 52 marathons in the last year to honor her dad.

No way am I running 52 marathons, buddy, not even for you. Chances are I might not even finish this one.

Yet, onward I go.

Miss my buddy Rhymer because of the yuks he would get over the communal Vaseline boards. As they go, the runners high-five a piece of scrap cardboard smeared with Vaseline, then apply it to the private parts prone to chafing.

This includes, I assure you, the male nipple, normally so forgotten and alone, some sort of mammalian remnant that — like a vestigial tail, or the show "Two and a Half Men" — has outlived its usefulness.

Let me tell you that after 26.2 miles, the male nipple is very much not forgotten.

My threshold of pain, by the way, turns out to be somewhere between that of Dorothy of Oz (a wandering princess) and Andrew Bynum (also a wandering princess).

I am sustained, fortunately, by the thousands of good folks lining the route, with signs: WHINE NOW, BEER LATER, or the existential KEEP RUNNING RANDOM STRANGER!

By Mile 14, I think I might've sucked down some bad tuna, for I'm not really paying close attention to what volunteers are handing me.

I'm mostly just "in the zone" and focusing on staying clear of the Vaseline boards, upon which I fear I might become permanently slogged.

Splaaaaaaaaaaaat. Take that, random stranger.

There is some sort of mitzvah going on in my intestines, but as I said, the port-o-potty lines are 10 deep. I would pay a million bucks for a porcelain toilet. OK, a million-five, but that's as high as I'm going.

By the way, this was all made possible by my running coach, Shannon Farar-Griefer, legendary in the world of ultra-marathons, who said one day after a seven-mile jog: "Sure, you can do this. We'll just scoop you up with a spoon when it's over."

With stories of 100-mile races so hot they melted her shoes, Farar-Griefer is an inspiring sort, though no real judge of character, obviously.

Because, after finishing in five hours and 20 minutes, I realize that there's only one way for a guy like me to run this race.

And that's to take a taxi.

A journalist's cautionary tale

A cautionary tale for journalists

This column offers an interesting perspective on working in the media by someone who loved her career but did not see a future in it. What's your reaction to what she has to say about choosing journalism as a career?

By Allyson Bird (Former reporter)

I get asked two questions several times a week, and I brush off both with a verbal swat.

One — because I’m in my late 20s, I suppose – is when are you getting married? And the other, because it seems like small talk, is why did you leave the newspaper?

I could answer both with a single word: Money.

But I usually deflect the marriage subject, wrongly justifying it as an acceptable passing question, with a practical reason: I’m not eager to have children.

And I answer the news question with something to which my audience can nod along: “It didn’t seem like a sustainable career path.”

But that’s a cold and detached answer. I don’t feel cold and detached about news, and I only give that response under the assumption that people don’t want to hang around for the full story – ironically, the same reason newspapers aren’t really working anymore.

So here goes. This is the real reason why I left news: I finally came to accept that the vanity of a byline was keeping me in a job that left me physically and emotionally exhausted, yet supremely unsatisfied.

I started working at newspapers in 2005, the tail-end of the good days. During my first year of work, a Florida newspaper flew me down to the Mexican border to write about cocaine cartel murders back at home.

We booked the first available flight, disregarding expense, and arrived before the investigators. That would not happen at a daily newspaper today.

I don’t think the Internet killed newspapers. Newspapers killed newspapers.

People like to say that print media didn’t adapt to online demand, but that’s only part of it. The corporate folks who manage newspapers tried to comply with the whims of a thankless audience with a microscopic attention span.

And newspaper staffers tried to comply with the demands of a thankless establishment that often didn’t even read their work. Everyone lost.

People came to demand CNN’s 24-hour news format from every news outlet, including local newspapers.

And the news outlets nodded their heads in response, scrambling into action without offering anything to the employees who were now expected to check their emails after hours and to stay connected with readers through social media in between stories.

There was never such a thing as an eight-hour workday at newspapers, but overtime became the stuff of legend.

You knew better than to demand fair compensation. If any agency that a newspaper covered had refused to pay employees for their time, the front-page headlines wouldn’t cease.

But when it came to watching out for themselves, the watchdogs kept their heads down.

A little more than a month after I left the newspaper, I went to Key West for a friend’s wedding. I realized on the drive home that I had never taken a vacation – aside from a few international trips – without some editor calling with a question about a story.

 I remember walking down Fifth Avenue in New York on my birthday a few years ago, my cell phone clutched to my ear and mascara running down my face, as an editor told me that he thought the way I had characterized a little girl with cancer needed to be sadder.

To many people, and even to me, part of the draw of news is that it never stops. You wholly invest yourself in a story – until something bigger happens. 

The only guarantee in any workday is the adrenaline rush. And even when the story isn’t terribly thrilling, you’ve still got a deadline to contend with, a finite amount of time to turn whatever mess you’ve got into 12 to 15 column inches that strangers would want to read.

The flip side to the excitement is the burnout. You’re exhausted, and you’re never really “off.”

You get called out of a sound sleep to drive out to a crime scene and try to talk with surviving relatives. You wake up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, realizing you’ve misspelled a city councilman’s name.

You spend nights and weekends chipping away at the enterprise stories that you never have time to write on the clock.

Everyone works so hard for so long and for such little compensation. The results are dangerous.

We saw it with the Supreme Court health care ruling, as our national news leaders reported the decision incorrectly.

We saw it with the Newtown massacre, when initial reports named the suspect’s brother as the shooter.

Major news outlets are no better than bloggers if they adopt a policy of getting it out first and correcting it later. They don’t have the money to fend off the resulting lawsuits, and they don’t have the circulation numbers to allow people to lose faith in their product.

Newspapers always have been liberal places where people work hard for little pay, because they believe in the job.

They always could empathize with the poor. But pay continues to dwindle to the point that I wonder what kind of person, today, enrolls in journalism school?

I took a pay cut when I moved back from Florida to Charleston, expecting to make up the difference quickly. Instead, I quit my newspaper job at 28, making less money than earned when I was 22.

I can’t imagine anyone outside of an affluent family pursuing a career with so little room for financial growth.

And I wonder: Would that well-to-do reporter shake hands with the homeless person she interviews?

Would she walk into a ghetto and knock on a door to speak with the mother of a shooting victim?

Or would she just post some really profound tweets with fantastic hash tags?

Maybe that’s what people – editors and readers – put at a premium now. Maybe a newsroom full of fresh-from-the-dorm reporters who stay at their desks, rehashing press releases and working on Storify instead of actual stories, is what will keep newspapers relevant.

But I doubt it.

The day I announced my resignation, I had to cover the alcohol ban on Folly Beach. The photographer working the story with me said very little about my decision, except for one heartbreaking statement: “But you were made to do this.”

I had thought so, too. For so long, people had asked me what I would do if my name wound up on a future round of layoffs, if my paycheck were furloughed into oblivion.

I had spent countless hours late at night trolling online for something else that appealed to me. But covering news was the only thing I ever had wanted to do and the only thing I ever had imagined doing.

I started writing stories for my local newspaper when I was 16. I worked seven internships in college, eager to graduate and get into a newsroom.

I left school early, school that was already paid for with enough scholarship money that I took home a check each semester, so that I could lug my 21-year-old life to West Palm Beach and work the Christmas crime shift alone in a bureau. And I wouldn’t change that decision for anything.

People in news like to describe a colleague’s departure, especially into a public relations or marketing job, as “going to the dark side.”

When word of my resignation traveled through the newsroom, I heard “dark side” references over and over, always with a smile and a wink. I couldn’t help but resent them. But I looked over my cubicle each time and flashed my best Miss America grin instead of the middle finger poised over my keyboard.

I now write for the fundraising arm of a public hospital. Anyone who thinks that’s going to the dark side is delusional.

And as my former coworkers ate farewell cake on my last day at the paper, a few of them whispered, “Do they have any other openings over there?”

I don’t know a single person who works in daily news today who doesn’t have her eyes trained on the exit signs. I’m not sure what that says about the industry, but I certainly don’t miss the insecurity.

Sure, it took me a while to get used to my new job. When I go to parties, I no longer can introduce myself as a reporter and watch people’s eyes light up. Instead, I hear how people miss seeing my byline. No one misses it more than I.

News was never this gray, aging entity to me. It was more like young love, that reckless attraction that consumes you entirely, until one day – suddenly — you snap out of feeling enamored and realize you’ve got to detach.

I left news, not because I didn’t love it enough, but because I loved it too much – and I knew it was going to ruin me.