Dr. Spaulding

From last week’s post, Photo Shout-Outs: Taken by Courtney Lockwood. See the rest of her photos here. Taken by Becky White. See the rest of her photos here. Taken by Elise Montalvo. See the rest of her photos here. Also, Brandi Bottalico did some excellent sequencing. Today: Feature stories, part two Warmup: Alternative leads worksheet [...]

For story #1, we talked about how important reporting was to your narrative. Today, we’ll talk about feature leads. A few basic types of feature leads: Anecdotal: a specific story that illustrates the main point of the story. Narrative: like an anecdotal lead, this lead is also a story. However it’s often longer, with dialog, [...]

Writing warm-up This is the subject of our writing warmup today: What ground rules or best practices should we operate by to produce ethical, accurate, compelling news? We’ll base this discussion on your homework reading (Lieb Ch. 14), the SPJ code of ethics (on the right) and our collective community experience. Here’s two ground rules [...]

At right: Valentines for journos, from the blog 10,000 Words Today we’ll start practicing for your first graded assignment, writing the basic news lede. First let’s look at a few ledes. From today’s news, four summary/direct ledes: Wildfires sweeping across Texas have destroyed more than 1,000 homes, Governor Rick Perry said Tuesday. –Reuters Hurricane Katia [...]

A great example of knowing when to break the rules from  Harold A. Williams’s history of The Baltimore Sun: [Sun correspondent Howard] Norton and three other American correspondents were in a press camp in Verona, Italy, in the spring of 1945 when they heard a rumor that Partisans had captured the fleeing Italian dictator, Benito [...]