By the end of this course students have the skills to write entire news stories that meet the standards of nearly all the newspapers and broadcast stations in the nation. I teach this course in the fall semester and sometimes in the summer. This is really a course in reporting. Students who learned how to write news stories in JRN 201 will now get a chance to work on real stories and real issues. Instead of using exercises from the book, students use interviews, documents and reports to gather the information and then write the stories.
Students attend meetings and speeches, conduct interviews and write about important issues.
Among the kinds of stories students write are issues stories, meeting stories, speech stories, profiles and advances. Students are encouraged to submit their finished work to the student newspaper, The Equinox, for publication, but this is not required. This course is offered in the spring semester. Part of the course work involves learning how to design pages using Quark Xpress, the same program that many professional newspapers use. By the end of the course, students will know how to select and edit stories, select and edit photographs, writes headlines and cutlines and finally put the whole thing into a printed page.