Eng. 227: Journalism
Writing the City

Associate Professor Cass Dalglish
Office
Memorial 224

Thursday: 4:45 to 5:45 p.m.
WEC Fridays: 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.
WEC Saturday mornings by appointment
Phone: 612-330-1009
dalglish@augsburg.edu

Course Goals| Course Design | Required Material| Routine Assignments| Community Service Learning |
Copy Editing and Style | Course Policies | Final Course Grading | Weekend Absence Policy|
WEC Assignment for First Class|

Course Goals
This is a course on the fundamentals of journalism. The most fundamental tasks a journalist must accomplish are:
  • Know the community
  • Gather facts
  • Verify facts
  • Put facts together in a news story
  • Compose on the computer
  • Edit and revise
  • Meet a deadline.

    Course Design
    At the end of this course, successful students will have an awareness of the city they're writing about and a feeling for its people, issues and institutions. They will also be able to:
  • Gather information
  • Decide if that information is newsworthy
  • Check and double-check the accuracy of all facts
  • Find the important idea or ideas
  • Put the ideas, quotes and facts together in a clear, well-ordered story
  • Clean up the grammar, punctuation and style
  • Write under pressure
  • Compose stories on the computer
  • Edit and revise their own and other writers' stories
  • Meet a deadline

    Good writing is the core of journalism
    The course will emphasize clean, clear writing. You will be expected to know how to spell, or at least how to use a dictionary. You will seek out such horrors as dangling modifiers, abused and misused words, and cliches and edit them from your stories. You will use Associated Press rules for style and punctuation. The course will introduce writing for broadcast, as well as print news and feature writing.

    Required Material
  • Writing and Reporting News: A Coaching Method, 4th Edition Carole Rich. Go to Writing and Reporting News.
  • The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual
  • A dictionary. (Any dictionary , as long as it has all the words).
  • A daily newspaper. Every student of journalism should read a daily paper. Visit the News Links page connected to your textbook NewsLinks or Newspaperlinks selected news sites.
  • Access to Radio, Television and online news sources. Use your textbook Newslinks NewsLinks.
  • A reporter's notebook. (Available in bookstore).
  • Folders: for clipping files, story files, finished stories and assignments.
  • Computer disks

    Routine Assignments
    News happens every day. All students in this course are expected to read a daily newspaper, to do assigned exercises on the computer, and to write news stories and features as assigned. Revisions must be completed by assigned dates. Originals must be handed in with revisions. Did I say: Deadlines are deadlines?

    Community Service Learning
    One of the goals of this course is to get to know the city, to have a feeling for its people, issues and institutions. To accomplish this goal, each student will have a community service learning assignment in the city. In the day program, students may work in shelters for the homeless, in projects for people with AIDS, in neighborhood centers, in public schools, in agencies and service organizations in the city. As journalism students work in the service learning site, they will reflect on the issues of urban life that are obvious in that setting and will select one of those issues as an "urban issues" beat. It works like this: A journalism student teaches English to adult immigrants at the Franklin Learning Center. The student identifies three urban issues -- immigration, literacy, and poverty -- and selects "literacy" as the urban issue to cover as a "beat." The student then writes three print stories about literacy, including a final feature interview with one of the interesting people the student met along the way. Weekend College students will continue to participate in the study of news stations in the Twin Cities and their representations of people of color on the news.We will add issues of gender to our study in this sixth year of research.

    Writing on the computer
    We will complete exercises in basic newswriting skills as well as writing complete news stories in class. Introductory assignments emphasize the basics. Lessons become progressively more difficult. We will write, revise, edit and re-write "stories." We will learn about the "new media," and tap into news sources like the     Minnesota Legislature site and other government sites on the WEB. If you are not at home on a computer, please see me immediately so we can schedule a special session in the computer lab. Schedule for use of the computer classroom will be available on the first day of class.

    Copy Editing and Style
    We will do a number of exercises in and out of class designed to improve your writing immediately and help you train your eye for copy editing. In these exercises you will get rid of cliches, cut down on the number of words you use, develop a sense of spelling, grammar and punctuation, and learn about newswriting style. Whenever there is a question about how something should be written, you should check the style book or the style appendix in the back of your text. Then do it the way the style book says. There will be several skills quizzes during the term.

    Course Policies
    This course simulates life in the professional newsroom, which means important work will be done in the classroom, in a news laboratory type setting.
  • Absences will have a negative impact on grades.
  • All completed assignments must be typed, double-spaced.
  • Stories must follow news format as explained in class and in text.
  • Deadlines are deadlines.
  • There is never an exception to the deadline rule.
  • Be prepared to save work to Augnet so that you can revise.
  • Every student will read the city newspaper and report on radio & TV news. Check out the StarTribune , or the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and New York Times on line. During our first class session, WEC students will sign up to read specific newspapers and will be expected to discuss these readings in class. Participation in class discussions of the news will be considered in course grading.
  • Every student will talk about the news of the city in class, have a community service assignment (the TV study in WEC), complete journal entries, and do stories connected to the community service urban issue beat to receive credit for the "City" perspective.
  • Students taking the course as a writing skills must achieve a 2.0 to receive "W" credit.

    Final Course Grading
    Final grades will be a combination of work in class and out: stories, exercises, newspapers critiques, completion of community service hours, revising and editing in class, questioning in class.
  • To achieve a 2.0 in this course, students must get a grade of at least 70 percent on one copy editing quiz. Writing skills and city requirements must be fulfilled. They must meet attendance requirements and participate in class discussions.
  • To achieve a 4.0 in this course, students must finish the term with at least a cumulative 3.75 average and have logged in 3 enterprise points. We will discuss possible enterpise projects in class. They include such things as writing and submitting work for publication to the Echo, a-mail, community newspapers, your company newsletter, and other on- and off- campus publications; writing extra stories about news events that happen in the community; giving formal reports to the class on current news stories which intersect with issues we are discussing in class; reporting to the class on issues raised on the national Society of Professional Journalists website and on the Minnesota SPJ site ; finding and correcting errors in professional news publications; reporting to the class on cases brought to the Minnesota News Council.

    Weekend Absence Policy
    Students who miss 1 class period may lessen that impact by agreement with the professor on suitable substitute assignments, but may suffer grade loss. Students who miss 2 WEC classes will not achieve a 2.0 for the course.

    WEC Assignment for First Class
    Pick up your books and read the introduction and first three chapters in the text: Writing and Reporting News, A Coaching Method, by Carole Rich.
    Read:
  • 1. Write from the Start: A Coaching Method.
  • 2. Changing Concepts of News.
  • 3. The Basic News Story.
    We will review these chapters and work on exercises in class together.

    Complete assignment lists are routinely handed out in person, in class. Please consult these print assignment lists for day-by-day or weekend-by-weekend course requirements.

    Cass Dalglish, Ph.D.