
My favorite shirt… Again, I was born for this…
Hope the Corona Hotline page is helping out for you folks out there trying to build stuff for your students when they can’t go anywhere. I meant what I said yesterday: If you need anything in media writing, news reporting or news writing, let me know and I’ll try to build it for you.
Case in point: I got this message from someone who teaches sports journalism:
One idea: sports coverage during this time? My plan is to still assign a feature/profile assignment and possible photos/social media assignment, but with all sports canceled that could be a cluster…
It’s a fair question someone else echoed in regard to event coverage: How can we have students write speech or news conference stories when there are no more speeches and news conferences happening near us?
To help out, I built a football game story exercise yesterday. I did a previous one when I taught online and it worked out, so I figured I could do a pretty decent replication for you. What I did was grab a box score and set of stats from a pretty old and yet memorable football game, strip off all the identifying features and change the names of the players and teams. I then did some “post-game interview” quotes from the coaches and from a couple players.
This prevents students from looking up the old game and just copying the info from previous reports. I also tweaked some of the key information to help shine a light on some angles that could make for good focal points in the stories they write.
As for speeches and news conferences, I found several transcripts of things going on now that could make for some solid speech or event coverage.
Please let me know if this works for you and if you need anything else. I can build stuff as you need it.
Best,
Vince (a.k.a. the Doctor of Paper)