“Corona Hotline… Yes, professor, we still have a land line…”
Each year in my writing for the media classes, I have students write a couple stories based on things that interest them. The problem I always faced was how to do this, because this course was an “everyone” course, not a reporting course and this was the first time a lot of these students were having to converse with other human beings for the purpose of garnering content that had to be spot-on, word-for-word accurate. Thus, having them each go out and do a handful of interviews was likely to end poorly for all of us involved…
What I did was have them pitch topics and I’d put them up on the white board. Once we had exhausted their interests, we would have a kind of an Athenian-democracy-meets-The-Hunger-Games kind of session in which we’d cut down the list to about eight topics. Of those eight, each student could vote for three, which would get us to the topics that we’d write on.
The students self-selected into groups based on interests. As I had 15 kids per class, the minimum per group was four and the max was six. They then had to discuss how they viewed the topic and who might make for a good interview subject. Each of them only had to interview ONE person, but they needed to make sure they all weren’t interviewing the SAME person (lotta calls from the police chief asking what the hell I was doing, after I forgot to mention that caveat one year after a particularly rough Pub Crawl Season…)
So, let’s say the topic was Pub Crawl, our twice-per-year event involving way too much day drinking that drives cops nuts and makes the kids do crazy stuff (one year, a young woman dove off her second-floor porch toward a kiddie pool in a back yard. She missed, but survived.)
Here’s how this would go:
Bobby: “OK, I know the police chief so I’ll interview him about what they’re doing different this year and what they want students to do.”
Susie: “Cool… I know a bouncer at The Drunken Clam who has to work on pub crawl and he’s worked the last five, so I’ll talk to him.”
Janie: “I know a girl coming down here for her first pub crawl from way out near Crivitz, so I’ll ask her about how she found it and why she’s coming.”
Nate: “Nice! I know two people who go every year, so I’ll get both of them!”
Clare: “My landlord has buildings all along Main Street and they always get trashed during Pub Crawl. I’ll talk to her about that.”
Troy: “I know a bartender at St. Elmo’s so I’ll interview her about her experiences at Pub Crawl.”
Each of these students then goes off and interviews their person and they send me the transcript of those interviews, along with any other information they found that they want to share. This could include links to previous stories on Pub Crawl, background on the sources and other such things.
I then put all of that material together into one big file for that group and call it something like “Pub Crawl RAW” so they all know it’s the raw material. Then, when they come to lab, they have to write a draft of a story based on whatever is in there that they want to use. They only need to do a two-page, typed, double-spaced piece on that topic. They can pick any angle they want. They only need to include TWO sources, but they can include as many as they see to be helpful in telling the story.
It’s like the old “pot luck suppers” we used to have at church or family gatherings: Everyone brings something and you can eat whatever you want.
That means that Bobby might decide not to use his interview from the police chief, but instead take the info from the bouncer and the bartender and do a “What it’s like to work on Pub Crawl” story. Clare might use her landlord and the police chief interview to talk about the negative aspects of Pub Crawl. Others might do the “why we love Pub Crawl” stories from the perspectives of the student interview.
After they file their stories, we go through the typical drafting processes with edits and suggestions and so forth.
This year, it was a bit tougher because a) half of my students were missing and b) it was hard to get interviews with people because students couldn’t go anywhere. What we came up with was kind of a compromise:
They went through the pitch process and got it down to three topics per class. I then agreed to either pull old interviews from previous classes and “freshen” them with updated information about life these days, or I agreed to make up content out of whole cloth after interviewing them a bit on the topic and digging around for other information. I then made up the names of the people, so there was no confusion, and they went about writing the stories.
I freely admit, I wish I could give them more experience in interviewing. However, in talking to them, I got the sense that they were afraid of going places (we’re a hot, hot, hot spot for the virus) and if they did this, the interviews would likely be weak as hell, which would impact the writing.
Still, this seems to be working, so I thought I’d share the stuff with anyone who needs it. The four topics (Spring Break, General Education Courses, TikTok and Movies/Theaters) are at the top of the Corona Hotline for Journalism Instructors Page, so feel free to grab whatever you want and use it however you want. I did some work to eliminate names and local references, but you might want to give this a look before you ship it out to the kids and they ask, “What the hell is a Kwik Trip?”
“Corona Hotline… No, I don’t know what a two-week pause is supposed to do in this pandemic either, professor…”
For those of you who weren’t with us last year when everything shut down and everyone was scrambling for assignments, exercises and general help, we established the “Corona Hotline” page as kind of a stockpile of stuff that I had built and folks were willing to share. You should feel free to click here to peruse it. All the stuff is freebie and I hope it helps.
For those of you who know all about it and are suddenly going on a “two-week pause,” (at least they didn’t call it an “inflection point”) and you need some additional help, I’ve added a few things to the page today:
Two lectures on blogging that I do. The topics are audience-centricity in terms of finding out whose out there and how to serve them as well as a deep look at the concept of “Why you?” in terms of what you should figure out before you pick a blogging topic to see if you can deliver value.
A blog-building exercise: It’s not tech stuff (if you want that, I can point you in a few directions), but rather kind of a pre-launch assignment that has the student analyze what’s out there in the area in which they wish to blog, determine what kinds of things they can put into their blog effectively and more. Think of it as kind of a “pitch” like they would have to make to a company if they wanted to start up a blog for those folks.
Grammar exercises:
Antecedent-pronoun selection
Who vs. Whom selection
Active vs. passive voice (I’ve had this for years, thanks to the late, great Patty Atwater)
A “medley” exercise that mixes all sorts of stuff in grammar.
You can get all that on the page as well. It’s up at the top. Hope it helps.
May the odds be ever in your favor, even when they’re not.
Frank LoMonte, one of our favorite legal eagles and frequent contributor to the “Dynamics” franchise, came up with the best extra credit assignment for his media law class during this pandemic:
Here’s what I told them. You’re going to learn to recite the 45 words of the First Amendment, by heart. If you do it right, it takes about 20 seconds. Just the right length for a respectable hand-wash. Film yourself doing it while washing your hands, and you get 10 extra-credit points. Make me laugh and it’s 15.
If this kid doesn’t earn the full 15 points, something is really wrong:
I swear that there used to be hand sanitizer in this thing…
As we noted in an earlier post, the Junk Drawer is usually full of stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else but you still need. Since I can’t seem to find anything out there that isn’t in some way related to the COVID-19 epidemic, today’s version is going to turn into the skid and go with it:
THE CORONA HOTLINE FOR INSTRUCTORS HAS MORE STUFF FOR YOU: Since we launched The Corona Hotline a week or two ago, we’ve been adding all sorts of exercises, examples and helpful tips for journalism instructors who have to move to distance education during the outbreak.
I just popped in a couple more exercises, including one that has students analyze partial quotes and a writing assignment they can do from wherever they are: A localization of the coronavirus. Local angles on this topic are everywhere, from local businesses trying to survive to students in “regular” jobs like cashiering who are now viewed as essential.
TECHNICALLY, I GUESS I COULD HAVE STAYED: Like most universities, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh has shut down for the semester. Only essential employees were required to be on campus starting last week Monday, but the chancellor did announce that faculty who felt a compelling reason to be on campus could be given special dispensation from their deans to work from their offices.
Since the place was basically a ghost town, and I have a mini-fridge full of Diet Coke there, I asked for that approval and got it. I was in the middle of recording a podcast Monday, when I heard a knock on my door and then a key hit the lock. As the door opened, I saw a giant man standing there in what looked like a full-on gas mask.
Guy: “Uh… You’re not supposed to be here…”
Me: “I have dispensation from the dean to work from my office.”
Guy: “Well, we were told no one would be here and we’re chemically disinfecting the whole building so you being here kind of defeats the purpose.”
I looked into the hallway and saw another guy with a huge chem tank spraying clouds of something into open offices, so I grabbed my computer, two binders of stuff and a spare keyboard and left.
I’m told the place will be safe in about 2-5 days.
SAVE YOUR BREATH ON THESE SENTENCES: A technique I give to students who want to know if their lead is too long or too “heavy” is to take a normal human breath and read it out loud. If you feel tight in the chest when you’re done, I tell them, it probably needs a trim. If you run out of air, you definitely need to take another shot at it.
President Trump, under growing pressure to rescue an economy in free fall, said Monday that he may soon loosen federal guidelines for social distancing and encourage shuttered businesses to reopen — defying public health experts, who have warned that doing so risks accelerating the spread of the novel coronavirus or even allowing it to rebound.
President Trump on Monday said he is considering scaling back steps to constrain the spread of the coronavirus in the next week or two because of concerns that the impact on the economy has become too severe.
Apparently, though, the writers suddenly realized they were writing for the Post and did this in the second paragraph:
But loosening restrictions on social distancing and similar measures soon probably would require him to override the internal warnings of senior U.S. health officials, including Anthony S. Fauci, who have said that the United States has not yet felt the worst of the pandemic, according to several people with knowledge of the internal deliberations.
Another 54-word sentence.
HOME SCHOOLING AT ITS FINEST: Zoe’s stuck here with the rest of us, trying to keep up on her school work. Yesterday, she came to Amy with this question:
Zoe: “I think I got this. A compound sentence is one that has two independent clauses and could be two complete sentences. A complex sentence is one that has a dependent clause and an independent clause, right?” Amy (turns to me): “Well, doctor?” Me: “Yes, that is correct.” Zoe: “I knew I had it backwards…” (she leaves) Me (in a whisper to Amy): “I was totally guessing…”
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.
One of the benefits of teaching media-writing classes is that I am limited in how much “reporting” I can force on the students, so a number of these exercises are canned writing pieces that lack a need for additional work. I also did some cleaning on them so that they’re more universal and less “UWO-centric.”
As I get deeper into my own class build, I’ll toss more stuff up here. If you have anything you want me to share, hit me up with it through the contact page. I’ll also be posting some teaching stuff here and there, along with links to student media outlets that are still grinding away during the crisis.
As always, we’re from the internet and we’re here to help.
Schools throughout the country have reacted to the spread of the coronavirus by pushing for “alternative delivery methods of instruction.” The goal is basically to get people away from one another while not having to cancel class. For most of us that means online instruction, a concept that some folks know well, others have had a little experience and still others react to with a level of freaking out that would impress Beaker from the Muppets.
I’ve taught online for more than a decade now, providing content through various delivery systems for multiple classes. I also am currently teaching courses I’ve taught for upwards of 20 years. Still, I’m probably at the freakout stage, primarily because nobody around here has been willing to pull the trigger on this yet and say, “Look, we’re making the call now. You get an extra week off after spring break to get your stuff together for online delivery. Plan for a month’s worth, but be ready for the whole term.”
I’m also one of those stupid people who likes to help other people, even as I’m drowning. Either I’m as dumb as a bucket full of hammers when it comes to deciding how to prioritize my time, or I’m way too old-school Polish-Catholic, in that we feed everyone else around us, even if we’re starving.
Either way, as my friend Allison would always say when taking on some sort of Quixotic do-good adventure on behalf of her blog: We’re from the internet and we’re here to help.
With that in mind, starting on Monday, I’m turning the blog into a pile of stuff that anyone who wants it can use for free. I’ll link to previous exercises I’ve built, stuff I’m building to teach my students, previous posts on the site and other stuff. Take whatever you want, use as much of it as you want and bastardize it for your own purposes however you want.
In the mean time, either post comments below or contact me through this form to tell me what you need and I’ll see what I have.
For those of you who have never taught online before, or who have limited experience, below is a list of things I’ve figured out over time that might be helpful:
YOUR BEST BET IS ASYNCHRONOUS CHUNKS: The argument of how best to reach students and make sure they’re keeping up with things often emerges when we’re dealing with online classes. If we do live-streaming stuff, we can force people to stay on track with certain parts of the class. If we do a full class dump online, we can let students work at their own pace.
Both of these approaches have benefits and drawbacks, and I’ve found that the drawbacks outweighed the benefits in both cases. This is why I’ve come up with a system meant to allow freedom of access while still creating firewalls against students who wait until the day before the class ends to try to do the work: Asynchronous chunks.
Here’s what I do: On day one of week one of the class, I open up everything the students will need for that week’s “chunk” of the course. Any lectures I do, any powerpoints they need, any quizzes they need to take, any readings they will need and any assignments or tests they need to accomplish. The due date for this material is usually Friday by noon of that week.
The students can do whatever they need, however they want, just as long as they meet the deadline of Friday at noon for dropping their work into the drop box for that week or finishing the online quiz portions. I then spend my weekend grading like crazy to try to get this stuff back to them as quickly as I can without making a mess of it. Once they get their graded stuff back, usually Sunday or Monday, I unlock week two and the system starts all over again.
What this does is it allows students to work however they want within a set of parameters. It prevents people from blowing off the work to the last minute, but it also prevents those “go-getter” students from drinking 27 Red Bulls and trying to do the whole class in 72 hours. The lazy ones are what we’re used to, so we might have a plan to deal with them. However, the quick-moving students will likely cause you a problem by screwing up something in week one and then repeatedly screwing it up in the work for weeks two, three, four and five because you didn’t have the opportunity to correct them on it. This “chunk” approach helps with that problem.
KNOW WHAT TOOLS THEY HAVE: “Go online” sounds like a great idea, but then again, I’m sure “Let them eat cake” sounded like a plausible solution at the time as well. We have students out here from a variety of backgrounds and circumstances and I’m sure we’re not alone in this. Depending on where your students will be sent, home might have the technological wizardry of the U.S.S. Enterprise or of two cans and a string.
A number of folks on various teaching message boards I frequented were talking about how their students were trying to get a month trial of the Adobe Creative Suite for a reduced price. Others talked about how certain video sharing services were allowing campuses free access to some of their higher-end tools to do virtual meetings.
My bigger question was, “Can students even run any of this stuff on what they own?” I’ve seen a number of my students carrying some of the jankiest laptops on Earth. In addition, I have students who live in rural areas where DSL is barely available, let alone anything with a true high-speed to it. If you are fortunate enough to work in a place where everyone is required to buy the same tech or where everyone is rich enough to have their own survival bunker, that’s great. For the rest of us, it comes down to a MacGyver approach of making do with what we have:
If you are still in your regular class periods, ask around to figure out what people have and what they don’t. If you’re not, it’s worth emailing your students before you launch and asking them what they have the capability to accomplish with the tools at hand.
One of the bigger reasons I went to the “chunk” approach was that I had students who were taking my class in areas where they would have to go somewhere to get internet access. (Last summer, two students who took my editing class online were living together in a converted SUV while selling fireworks at a roadside stand. At the start of each week, they would trudge to town and use the wifi from the laundromat to download all the stuff. Then, at the end of the week, they’d repeat the trek and upload their finished work.)
Knowing what kind of tools the students have is vital in limiting frustration on both of your ends.
GO BACK TO THE NOUN-VERB-OBJECT FOR YOUR GOALS: When I take students online, the goal is to give them an experience that is as valuable as the one they would get in the classroom. That said, I know full well it won’t be the same experience as they will have in the classroom. It can’t be.
What helped me in building my online courses was the same thing that helped me write books when I had trouble with communicating a concept: I went back to the basics of noun-verb-object. In short, I tried to figure out how to finish the sentence “Students need X” or “I must give students Y.” Doing this allowed me to re-calibrate my thought process on what I was actually accomplishing within the classroom and what needed to come out of that for the online kids. Once I nailed that down, I was able to build things specifically for that class to accomplish that goal online.
Case in point: When I taught media writing online, what I wanted students to get out of a news writing assignment was the issue of balance among sources. To do this in the classroom, I had the students individually interview people (one interview per student) and then I would collect those interviews into a giant pile that everyone in the group could use to write from (think the old “bring a dish to pass” approach).
Online, I couldn’t do that as easily, nor could I employ my “pitch a topic” approach I used in class. For a while I was stuck because I kept trying to replicate the entire assignment online and found I couldn’t do it. Eventually, I realized that I wanted them to a) write a story and b) use multiple sources to c) create balance between viewpoints. When I figured that out, I rebuilt the assignment. I gave them the transcript of a speech I made up, along with two press releases that “reacted” to that speech from various perspectives. (Pro and con) They then had all of that material to use for the assignment. It ended up working just fine.
Did they get the interviewing experience? No, but I realized that wasn’t the point of the assignment, so I didn’t go nutty trying to force that in here. Instead, I found a different way to get them that experience when I had the chance.
Figure out what you want them to do in that simplest way and you’ll be in much better shape as you reconfigure this for a different environment.
RE-EXAMINE YOUR EXPECTATIONS: People who see this point might be thinking, “He wants us to lower our standards of grading and work quality!” Not really. It is about trying to determine how best we want to assess our students in this new environment.
Think about it this way: Let’s say you’re catching a flight overseas for a two-week vacation. As the plane is taking off, you’re thinking, “I hope they get us there on time for me to make the opera I have tickets to,” or “I hope they have a good meal for us for dinner” or “I hope that the movie on this flight is good.”
Then, 20 minutes into the flight, all four engines quit and you’re in a total stall over the Atlantic Ocean. You probably are now thinking, “I hope I don’t die.”
That re-examination of expectations doesn’t mean you’re lowering your standards. It means you’re dealing with the reality of your circumstances. If your last thought as the plane crashes was, “Oh, God, not another damned ‘Avengers’ movie…” you have some serious issues.
This point can dovetail nicely with the previous one. A photo colleague and I were talking about this before classes began today. He noted that his students were supposed to be doing studio work at the exact time the university would likely be moving everything online. He thought about re-configuring his class to move the studio assignment later in the semester in hopes things would come back to campus. However, he said if that didn’t happen, he didn’t know what he’d do.
I said I’d dig around and figure out what I MOST wanted out of that studio experience and see how it could be replicated somewhere else. If the goal was to shoot photos against a neutral background, could they use something other than the studio backgrounds to do it? If the goal was to shoot still life images with certain lighting situations, would they have stuff around the house they could use to replicate that? In other words, how could we improvise and adapt the expectations of the work to get them the key aspect of the experience?
Not everything can be done this way, clearly, but in terms of looking at it less as “The assignment demands X, Y and Z” and more in terms of “Here is what I want you to get and that’s what I’m going to grade you on,” the better off you both will likely be.
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Clearly, there is a lot more to this than these tips, but I hope they’ll get you started or at the very least, confirm what you already know about this. In between now and Monday, please send me any needs or concerns or pleas for help and I’ll do my best to make this work.
We’re all in this together, so let’s see what we can do.
It’s the most glorious time of the year around here, as the snow is melting, or at least melting to the point where we can see over the snowbanks while backing out of the driveway. Classes are in a groove and students are figuring out that they actually CAN write if they put their minds to it.
Best of all? We are so much closer to getting baseball back into our daily lives.
To celebrate this wonderful part of the year, here’s an AP style quiz that uses baseball stuff to get you in game shape for the upcoming season.
You don’t need to start an account to play, but if you do, it’ll allow you to be ranked overall. Accuracy counts most, but speed matters, so go get ’em.
Forty years ago today, the United States Hockey team won the gold medal at the Lake Placid Olympics, defeating Finland 4-2 in a game that almost no one remembers. That’s because two days earlier, the U.S. beat the Soviet Union, in an upset that became known as “the Miracle on Ice.”
Herb Brooks, who coached the University of Minnesota hockey team to three NCAA championships, built a team of 20 skaters from the college and minor-league ranks to compete against the best the world could provide. The Soviet Union built its team of professionals, men trained to play the game since boyhood and then placed on the Red Army team, where they honed those skills throughout the year.
The Soviets were in line to win their fifth consecutive Olympic gold medal in 1980, having not only destroyed whatever amateur competition the world could provide, but having crushed the NHL in a series of exhibition contests over the years. (The glorious exception being the 1972 Summit Series and a 1976 beating the Philadelphia Flyers put on them.) They cruised into the medal round, expecting to win easily.
The U.S. eked its way into the medal round, having tied Sweden in the opening game of the tournament and then defeating Norway, West Germany, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The semi-final game against the Russians took place on Friday at 5 p.m., despite U.S. attempts to get the game moved to prime time for TV.
Despite being out-shot 39-16 and never leading throughout the first 50 minutes of the game, the U.S. ended up taking a lead with exactly 10 minutes to play in the third period. Mike Eruzione’s shot on Vladimir Myshkin found the back of the net and the U.S. had a 4-3 advantage. Despite pelting goalie Jim Craig with a barrage of shots over the next 10 minutes, the Russians couldn’t solve him.
In honor of this monumental event, which I could spend a few hundred thousand words yammering on and on about, I put together this AP style quiz based on the Miracle on Ice team and its Olympic run.
Click here to try it out. You don’t need an account to play, but if you have one, it will track your score for an overall ranking. Challenge your professor to play and post a screen shot of your victory to claim bragging rights.
This is still one of the more popular posts on the blog, if you don’t count the “First-Person Target” series and those that covered high school journalists getting shafted. The ability to come up with a fun lead-writing exercise can be difficult, but this one seems to work so we’re reposting it here as we head toward the end of the semester. Enjoy!
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In many cases, songs are essentially stories, just told in a different way. If you want a lead-writing exercise that emphasizes critical thought and a bit of fun, have your students write a basic lead to capture the 5W’s and 1H of a popular song. If you want to make it a bit more challenging, add the rule that they can’t use the title of the song in the lead.
Consider this holiday favorite for a simple news lead:
SUMMARY LEAD: Citing a recent break-up, a Memphis man said Thursday he will be depressed this Christmas, even as he wishes his former girlfriend well.
If you want to have a little more fun or dig a little deeper, this song has been on constantly around here:
Interesting-Action lead: A North Pole man is accused of homicide after one of his reindeer trampled an area grandmother to death Sunday night.
Name-Recognition lead: Santa is wanted in a hit-and-run accident that left one woman dead Sunday night as she left a family gathering.
Day-Two lead: Members of an area family are in mourning Monday after their “grandma” was killed in a hit-and-run accident overnight.
Looking for a “concert review” lead? Try this one:
Review lead: An area percussionist upstaged several other acts in an impromptu gathering Monday in Nazareth that marked the birth of Christ.
OK, enough with Christmas…
Summary/Event lead: Many celebrities celebrate “the festival of lights” rather than Christmas during this holiday season, a Brooklyn man said Thursday.
If you want to get away from the holidays all together, you can always pick a song from the recent inductees at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame:
Interesting-Action lead (two sentence edition): In spite of financial struggles and personal problems, a New Jersey couple said Thursday love has kept them together. Tommy, an unemployed dock worker, and Gina, an area waitress, said they will continue to fight for a better life because “you live for the fight when that’s all that you got.”
No, I don’t know “any bands from this millennium,” and half the songs my students suggested had a little too much cussing in them to make the folks at SAGE comfortable, so here’s something more recent, less caustic and still really poppy.
Broadcast lead: Don’t wait to have fun in life. That’s the message a London-based boy band had for its listeners Thursday morning.
It’s hard to think about it being Halloween, when you have this scene happening outside your house at 7 a.m.:
The plows had already gone through once and it took me 20 minutes to find my window scraper. That said, since the calendar says it’s Oct. 31, here’s an AP style quiz based on a Halloween theme.
You don’t have to establish an account to play. It’s 10 questions and you will be judged on speed and accuracy.
Take a screen shot of your score and post it everywhere! Challenge a professor (who likely wants this break more than you do) and earn bragging rights for the year.
