Zach: How do you get your news?

One of the options we had for class was revising up to two of our previous stories for up to 10 points of extra credit. I chose to update one of my stories about news media (which can be found here) and create a how-to guide for bringing news to you in a quick, convenient way. The guide revolves around two services offered: Twitter and Read It Later.

For those of you unfamiliar with Twitter, it's a social networking site where people can share information (news, what they're up to, etc.) in 140 characters or less. A lot of news companies such as the New York Times have Twitter accounts and "tweet" (post) headlines to their stories with links to the online content, allowing users to access the article without having to find it on the website.

Read It Later is a service that saves links, much like del.icio.us, except that the main purpose is storing articles in a list to read them later. The convenient part comes from having their apps on your smartphone or iPod touch, which allows you to take your stories on the go (a wireless connection required to get the articles, but not to read them).

If you would like to know more, click here. Thanks for reading!

-Z

Zach: ASF Update

My alternative story form draft (ASF) is just about wrapped up. I've organized everything into a nice table with information about each meal plan and some quotes from students who are on that specific meal plan. I've also included information about what kinds of foods are offered in the cafe every day and which meal plan gets which foods (they actually can get every kind of food that is offered). The final revisions will be done on Monday and I will post a link to the final product when it's done.

-Z

Alternative Story Form

Whats new this week?
Well, with the school days quickly winding down I've been focusing all of my attention (with regards to this class) on my alternative story form assignment.

To tell you the truth I'm finding this assignment to be a lot more difficult than I originally anticipated. I wouldn't necessarily call it hard it's just way more time consuming than I ever imagined it to be.

As a class we were told our alternative story form would be apart of a website called 'Coe for Dummies.' So... being me, I chose a topic that I thought would be the easiest and let me be the first to tell you, boy was I wrong.

My topic is places on Coe's campus and I plan on doing an interactive map with descriptions of each building. Sounds easy enough right? Yeah, that's what I thought too until I realized just how many buildings this so called 'small liberal arts school' actually had. I may have my work cut out for me so wish me luck!

Zach: Alternative Form Story

The next story that we will be working on is the alternative form story. An alternative form story (ASF) is a story written in a nontraditional form, whether it be a charticle, Q&A, list, etc. The story can be a standalone story, but is usually used to supplement a story by adding interesting information that didn't quite make it into the main story.

For my ASF, I will be talking about the different meal plans Coe has to offer for students. Because Coe is a residential campus (students have to live on campus unless they meet certain requirements), students must also be on a meal plan, unless they live in the apartments. Coe offers four different meal plans, each with a certain amount of Coe Cash (credit used to buy food/other items in our convenience store). The meal plans are as follows:

• 20 meals/week with $25 Coe Cash for the semester
• 16 meals/week with $75 Coe Cash for the semester
• 11 meals/week with $100 Coe Cash for the semester
• "Flex" Plan: 160 meals to be used at any time with no Coe Cash. Meals may be converted into Coe Cash at a rate of $5 Coe Cash for 1 meal converted.

The story is geared towards incoming students and will be written in chart/charticle form. I'll be interviewing Tom Wieseler from Sodexo about the various plans and also some students with each plan to get their take on them.

I'll post my story/a link to the story when it's finished so you can read it. Have a great day!

-Z

International Student's experience in America

This guy from Israel vividly explain about culture shock and what is like to be in America. I thought it is funny and educational to watch.

Slideshow Story is Done!

Finished my slideshow story today. A slideshow story is a news story told with pictures and cutlines (captions) rather than the traditional paragraph format. The same elements (5 W summary lede or hooking lede/nut graf) are present, but pictures have also been added. This can create a more interesting story by using visual images to convey information.

If you would like to view my slideshow (and also my journalism workshop website), click here.

Let me know what you think!

-Z

A sunny tuesday at Coe

Learning & Practicing: Picture Day!

Below are a few pictures from our Picture Day in Journalism Workshop. With the rapid expansion of technology (specifically smartphones), journalists are forced to be able to "do it all": get the story or interview, do the sound bite and shoot the photo for the print article. Picture Day was a lesson on taking web-quality pictures in a variety of angles and distances.

-Z

Professor Jane Nesmith shows an example of a tight-angle photo.

Krishen Narcelles practices her photo-taking with her Blackberry.


Aaron Schrock watches Professor Nesmith's lecture intently.


Lwin Nyein Chan Kyaw enjoys the photography lecture.

Burmese Refugees Story

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nygus/2959817932/

As I was looking for a story told by the pictures, I found them. These are really appealing pictures, which depict the condition of ordinary people of Burma in the border region. They were forced to leave their homeland in search of jobs, security and opportunities for their future.

Feature Story Slide Show: A Story Without Words

You're probably wondering to yourself, why is a journalism class being assigned a project that doesn't involve words? Like i said previously, ideally what we want to do is move towards becoming a multimedia journalist and to do so we need to take the next step, which in our case is photography. My classmate, Kathryn Meade (who I am very excited to be working with for this assignment!) and I will be doing our slide show presentation on softball. You see, everyone in our class were told their pictures had to fall somewhere under the guidelines of 'practicing and learning at Coe College' and we thought documenting one of our lovely softball teams practices would be a fun angle to base our story on. I can't say my partner or myself has ever had any experiences taking photos before (besides the everyday Facebook ones) so this should be fun!! Wish us luck!!!

Zach: "I follow blogs?"

As you probably guessed from the title, I don't really "follow" any blogs. Sure, I follow a few people on Twitter (follow me if you like) but I don't really follow any traditional, above-140-characters blogs. The main ones I read are Bits and Gadgetwise, both of which are New York Times blogs and deal in realm of technology. As I've said before, I'm a sucker for technology but I also read some of the occasional other blog posts that the Times tweets as well.

I suppose I also follow Shawn Kupfer's 47 Echo blog, but mainly because I loved his first book and am eagerly awaiting the second one. If you own a Kindle (or even if you don't), here is a link to the book on Amazon.

My question for you: what blogs do you follow? Any suggestions for ones I should as well?

-Z

Practicing and Learning at Coe

The ideal journalist in today's society are what we like to call multi media journalists, meaning not only should they know how to write but they should be able to be a TV reporter, TV photographer, newspaper photographer and a newspaper writer at any point in time.

That being said professor Jane Nesmith has started teaching our journalism class how to take news worthy photos like the following:

Practicing and Learning at Coe

Yay! let's take a picture!

Professor Nesmith showing the students what are the best picture looks like

Students are practically shooting pictures for their blogs