Journalism

This is a PowerPoint that I use when teaching a journalism unit on newspaper design. The presentation includes elements like modular design and pull quotes. It also shows no-nos like butting headlines and trapped white space. After taking notes from the PowerPoint, students bring in newspapers and magazines to look at and discuss as a class. Then they use Adobe InDesign to create their own designs using given photos and text.

This is a viewing guide for students to fill out while watching the documentary The Cove. I use this film and guide in my journalism class in a unit focusing on documentary films as journalism. This viewing guide only covers the first part of the movie. After they finish filling out this guide, they turn it over and create additional questions of their own on the back of the guide.

The purpose of this assignment is to help students explore the importance of perspective in writing and to practice using specific nouns, adjectives, and verbs to connote a specific feeling to a reader.  Presented with an image of a piece of cheesecake, students must describe the slice from the perspective of both a cheesecake "lover" and cheesecake "hater."  Students are not allowed to change the facts about the slice of cheesecake, but instead change up their word choice to convey two drastically different perspectives on the same image.  Each description should be 100-150 words.

This is the first lesson in a unit over advertising and media literacy.  The aim of this lesson is to have students think about what ads are, where they see them, what constitutes as an ad, and the techniques used in advertising.  After having students brainstorm, ask them to identify the slogans.  Then they can go through magazines, newspapers, etc. to find print ads that use the techniques in their campaigns.

This lesson idea comes from: Hinman, Shirley Lee. Journalism: Writing for Publication. The Center for Learning, 2005.

Objective(s): Students should be able to identify questionable journalistic tactics, explain why they are questionably ethical, and then incorporate them into a piece of creative journalism.

Materials Needed In Advance: Purchase a few supermarket tabloids in advance of the lesson. Be sure to expunge stories that are truly inappropriate for school-aged children (and be careful---those are everywhere!).

Procedure: Distribute the tabloids to smaller gorups of students. Give them a few minutes to scour the tabloids. The seedier the publication, the more restless the students may get.