Profiles

Here are a few profiles (the first one is technically an obituary) to get you thinking about how they’re done. I’ve included a couple of classics and a few that have more recently caught my eye. Each is much longer than the piece I’m asking you to write.

“Nixon’s Real Enforcer” by Francis Wilkinson from The New York Times magazine annual The Lives They Lived. Dec. 25, 2005.

“Aleksey the Great” by Ben McGrath from The New Yorker, Oct. 23, 2006.

“The Littlest Hustler” by Alex Goldberg from New York magazine, Dec. 3, 2007.

“Frank Sinatra has a Cold” is the Gay Talese classic from Esquire, April 1966.

“Orchid Fever” by Susan Orlean in The New Yorker, Jan. 23, 1995. It became The Orchid Thief and later was adapted into the film Adaptation.

Mediabistro

This isn’t new news, but I thought it would be useful to many of you. Mediabistro.com is a site devoted to the media industry—particularly news and magazine journalism and book publishing, but there’s other stuff in there, too. It’s got discussion boards, how-to-pitch articles, instructional videos and panels, industry news and events. Membership is about $50 per year, but it’s worth it if you want to immerse yourself in the industry. It’s somewhat New York oriented but does acknowledge the rest of the country.

News Spin on Where’s Waldo

It used to be that you’d go and cover a meeting, return to the office and file your story. Your view, one way. Here’s what National Public Radio is doing with a health care reform meeting (yeah, radio using a picture). NPR wants to know if you know anyone in the room who’s a lobbyist. I got this from ProPublica, a non-profit investigative reporting group that thought it was a great idea and wanted to pass it along to its readership.

NPR wants to know if you know anyone in the room here who's a lobbyist.

We talked yesterday about time and how to write about news events with an eye toward their shelf life. What NPR is doing here adds interactivity and connectedness and gives a single meeting legs that it wouldn’t have had in traditional media outlets.

The little “i” tells you who they are when you scroll over them. Fun stuff.

Why They Hate Us…

Vanity Fair has a bullet list of why the public hates the media and tries to analyze the validity of the various gripes. Romenesko linked it this morning and I thought you would like it.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2009/06/23/a-media-guy-asks-why-do-they-hate-us.html

News is New, Right?

This bit from The Daily Show about the New York Times makes me laugh and cringe at the same time. It’s a good introduction to our discussion about the time element of  journalistic writing.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=230076&title=end-times

Eight Ways of Visualizing the News

This was passed on to me by Deb Morrison, the School of Journalism and Communication’s advertising chair. I thought you might be interested in it as we begin our discussion of what news is and how its presentation is evolving.

http://10000words.net/2008/06/8-ways-of-visualizing-news.html

Allen Hall Boot Camp Syllabus

J408 Reporting and Information Strategies
Summer 2009 10-11:50 MW
Mark Blaine
311B Allen
Office Hours: Wednesday 12:30-1:30 and by appointment (I’m very flexible—please email and arrange a time)

This class will introduce you to fundamentals of journalistic reporting and writing in a digital media environment. You’ll be asked to write, edit, aggregate, reflect, shoot, and record. My intent is to expose you to a wide range of skills and help you to think about integrating them. This is less a class about delivering arcane knowledge than one about practice, exploration and teamwork. I’m here to be your editor and adviser through the first couple of months in graduate school and I can help you with a wide range of issues that you may be dealing with in your move to journalism graduate school.

You will learn:

• Basic reporting
• News burst writing
• Story forms
• Strategies for digital publishing
• The media landscape of Eugene and Oregon

We’ll meet on Monday and Wednesday, but you have available lab time at 10 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday to work with your partner on stories.

ASSIGNMENTS:
Everyone will maintain a blog related to their reporting in this class. I’d prefer that you use WordPress because I have the most familiarity with it, but if you’re comfortable with another blog software/host feel free to use it.

I’ll maintain a blog called Allen Hall Boot Camp (allenhallbootcamp.wordpress.com) that will include a blogroll of all of your blogs, links and readings that are relevant to our discussion, the syllabus and the media map that we create this term.

Weekly aggregation
Write three posts for your blog with links to three stories (one must be from nontraditional media) and a short (75-word maximum) summary that gets to the heart of the story and why it’s relevant to Eugene/Lane County. The posts are due by Wednesday at midnight.

Story generation
Post at least one picture each week to your blog that relates to something happening in Eugene or Lane County. Try to relate it to what you’re aggregating.

Work in a team to write a weekly 300- to 500-word story (with partner) developed from your reporting. This can riff on one of your aggregator stories (that’s encouraged) but it must bring three new sources, or new takes from those sources, to the table. You will submit the story as a team with a byline that says who wrote it and who edited it. You will email me those stories by Monday at midnight (mblaine@uoregon.edu) and I’ll review them on Tuesday. After I review them and get back to you, you should publish them on your website. Make sure you write them to allow for this delay (we’ll talk about hooks very soon). Everyone should have at least two bylines by the end of the summer term.

Write a 1,000-word profile of someone who would be interesting to readers in Eugene or Lane County. Include some element of multimedia that helps tell the story. It could be a brief slide show or a video clip of an interview. A draft of this will be due on July 27 at midnight. You’ll need to email it to your workshop members. The final version will be due on August 12 at midnight.

Media map
We’ll compile a class map or database of media in Eugene with particular emphasis on digital sources. Your job is to bring at least one new media source every Wednesday that has something to do with Eugene or Lane County. They can be narrow or broad, but come ready to discuss who you think they are trying to reach and how effective the sites are at doing that. These will serve as points of discussion about their audience and news value. You are on the hook for one each week, but I’d like to make this list comprehensive. Please feel free to bring more or add to the list at any time by emailing me. I’ll maintain the links on the class blog.

Jane Singer’s New Media Employment Landscape

Here’s an interesting take on what journalism jobs are evolving into. It’s a good starting point to think about how you want to shape your career.

http://aejmc.org/topics/2009/05/bird%E2%80%99s-eye-view/