Basic Policies
- Attendance policy: Absense of more than 10 percent of the class will result in corresponding percent decreases in the grade. Missing more than 40 percent of the class would mean a D for an otherwise A student and so on.
- Late policy: Late completion of projects will result in reduction of grade by one letter grade per week.
- Disabilities policy: We are glad to work with all students to accomodate disabilities on a non-discriminatory basis. Students with special needs may be required to clear accomodations through the disabilities resource office of the university.
- Honor Code: By accepting admission to Radford University, each students makes a commitment to understand, support and abide by the University Honor Code without compromise or exception.
- Plagiarism -- Students who directly copy work from anyone else will flunk the class and be reported to the Dean of Students office.
IMPORTANT: How to turn in assignments:
Turn in all assignments by posting them on your portfolio site. If they are in rough draft form, please send via email. Label with name, slug and class. (eg Smith.fire.404.doc) in three places:
- the email subject line
- the .doc file name itself
- inside as you regular name-slug-date info
Please send all assignments in easy to read formats (such as doc but not docx or wpd). Only stories turned in on time can be rewritten for an improved grade. One week grace period before the grade clock starts ticking down.
Assignment agenda
Assignments will originate in several ways:
- You will be given beat and story assignments at the start of the class. These will involve City Council, cops, school board, environment, Faculty Senate, Frats & Sororities, RU events, and others. Beats will rotate.
- You are welcome to suggest stories, but its best to get guidance and suggestions if you can beforehand.
- Spot news assignments from news organizations such as The Tartan (RU), Appalachian Voice, the New River Voice, the Radford Journal or the Roanoke Times.
Your stories will be published in some of these spaces:
- Your own blog space in wordpress, greenpress or some other free blog space. (Example: Angela Distefano, UWO)
- Contributions to the class blog (Example from Fall 2009, Ontario Green )
- Contributions to other news organizations, including The Tartan (RU), Appalachian Voice, the New River Voice, the Radford Journal or the Roanoke Times.
There will be several quizzes on readings but no mid term or final exam.
Grading priorities will follow this emphasis:
- Quizzes on readings and NewsU modules: 10%
- Writing assignments (6): 60% First deadline is in 1 week; Every 2 weeks for each story after that.
- Large project: 30%: Due early April
A few salient quotes to get us started:
"I just think that everybody (in themedia] is playing to the lower common demoninator ... All this is driven by what certain executives in boardrooms think people in your age group want. How insulting is that? They have decided that your generation is a bunch of ... idiots. That all you want is stuff you can completely absorb in 30 seconds, max. That you have no attention span, that you much more interested in form than content. That you are multi-tasking right and left so that you are never absorbing information from one source at a time, you're always focusing your brain on your iPod and TV at the same time, and so forth. Do you accept that description of your generation?" -- Laurie Garrett interview with Columbia Journalism Review
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time, when the United States is a service and information economy ... when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical facilities in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media ..". -- Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Random House, 1995
If you want to be a serious student and analyst of the world, if you want to do really good journalism and journalism that tells the truth as you see it, then broadcast journalism is not the place to go today. There are still good newspapers." -- Bill Moyers, Santa Barbara Independent, Feb. 24, 2005.
"Maybe ... we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent 'mysteries' that the modern world throws at us." -- Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker