Identify your theme. Write it in a statement. Don’t make it too broad. Think of it as a trend. Something is happening that affects a lot of people.
Then apply the questions rigorously to the statement. What is this happening? Where? What’s the scope? What are the reasons? (There may be lots of reasons, and you could make short posts about three or four.) What are the countermoves? If this trend continues, what is likely to be the result?
Hugh Masekela, the great South African musician, was written up in the New York Times in March.
Once you start looking at migrants, you realize they are all over the world, and the populations of the world are constantly moving, looking for work, looking for life.
A documentary film about lying in politics. Playing at the River Oaks theater. Highly recommended.
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/themostdangerousmaninamerica/
There will be no meeting on May 3. Wednesday April 28 is our last meeting
Some of you are behind. If we were having a final exam, we would take it on Friday May 7. I’ll accept posts until then.
As I have said many times, use the questions in the handout. Follow them literally. These questions work because they are precise. Some of the questions you are writing are vague. Vagueness in a question will lead to vagueness of the posting. Don’t be afraid to take a question literally. This is not plagiarism. This is following instructions.
For example, one of Blundell’s questions is about locale. That’s a great question. Hardly anyone is using it. But locale might be very important, for example, in identifying where poor schools are located. Locale leads to reasons. What is it about this locale that leads to a problem?
A new movie about underground rock in Iran.
A story in the NY Times today about fundamentalist Islamic students embodies some of the questions in Blundell’s list. Two important questions are answered at the bottom of the story: what are the psychological reasons that students enlist with the Islamicists?
As unpopular as it may be on campus, the group never has trouble getting recruits. Many first-year students are shy, underprivileged youths from the countryside. The group appeals to this weakness, helping with expenses and opening up a system of benefits: More milk in their tea. Better food. Cleaner dishes.
“It’s an addiction,” Ms. Tayyib said, describing the thinking of the young recruits. “I’m from a remote area, and no one ever listened to me. But now I’m important.”
And the final question that is posed is about the future. What will happen next. The question of the future is often the last question in a story. It’s a way to tie it all up.
Mr. Baloch, who received more than 30 stitches in his head, said he believed that the attack had galvanized public opinion against the group and that it would serve to turn people against it. “The wheels of justice grind slowly but surely,” he said.
Others are less certain. Last week, several of the attackers were arrested, but Mr. Ashraf, the ringleader, was not among them. Besides, the group’s top leader on campus is the son of an important politician.
“This opportunity will be lost,” said Nazia, the young teacher. “I know it’s pessimistic, but it’s what I’m thinking.”
The Internet has made it possible to find expertise to an unprecedented degree. Don’t be content with the first thing you find on a Google search. Follow the web of connections.
The National Council on Public Polls offers “Twenty Questions a Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results.”
Several websites offer mashups of polls. Cornell offers an index of polls. Very interesting.
So much information is available so rapidly that journalists have a special problem. They have got to be thorough in their research, or they risk publishing expertise that is inaccurate or out of date. And readers now have the ability to check up on journalists in a way they never have before.
A lot has been made about the bad information on the web. Our goal is to provide good information, expert information. Journalists are seldom experts. They are story-tellers. They know how to put information together from various sources to create the story. The information may be buried in a government web site or the findings of an advocacy group. The journalist breathesnew life to that information by putting it in a context that people want to read.
Readers are starved for expertise. Possibly you saw the recent story of the UH blogger last week. He had posted a opinion about the release of a helicopter gunship video of the shooting a several people in 2007, including a two Reuters journalists. The guy’s usual postings are about his classes, what he did on his weekend in Austin, etc, but this posting went viral, as the saying goes, because he had considerable experience reviewing such video tapes. He argued that the WikiLeaks version of the tape misinterpreted what happened. Newspapers picked up on the posting, and before long he had a brief moment of fame.
The professional witness is one kind of expertise.
But there are others. The government, for example collects lots of great information in the census. This year’s census will be a mine of information. Texas government has a wealth of information in its websites. The state was an early adopter of posting public information. In that respect alone, the Internet can be said to be transformative of government and citizens rights to know.
For the Houston Area, check the Houston Area Survey. The results of the new survey will be released Wednesday.
For academic sources, check the Communications Virtual Library.
See if you can amass a library of links about your topic, and give some indication of what the links offer. There might be a dozen or more groups that maintain useful websites.
Check out the think tanks, such as the Pew Center for Research. This site has great research on public opinion. But it also has
It’s tempting to just blog about whatever you’re interested in without much pattern.
I want you to create a story systematically by:
1) generating a theme statement
2) selecting and answering the appropriate questions from the research plan
3) answering those questions by finding experts.
I’d like to see you find great sources on the Internet. Use government web sites, academic research, research by advocacy groups. If you’re writing about education, find out what the teachers unions are saying, the administration groups, the academics, the parents groups, the business groups, the political parties, and so forth. Reach widely. Don’t be content with the first thing you find. Every interest group in education sees things through its own interests and needs. As journalists we have to sort those interests out, make them obvious.
The blogs should be full of useful information from knowledgable sources.
In short, don’t write about your personal opinions. Go out in cyberspace and dig up what the experts say. That is, by the way, what journalists do day in and day out. They are constantly asking experts about what’s going on in a story. So think of your blog as a reporting blog. Learn to separate fact from opinion.
Don’t wring your hands about how terrible something is. If it’s really terrible, the most effective thing you can do is dig up the facts and spread the information.
