Journalism Class - Wednesday November 9

[jerusalem-s.livejournal.com]

The cat has a frog, Spider has his coffee and all's well with the world, apparently. Spider's sprawled behind his desk, bare feet resting on the blotter and his laptop propped on his legs.

"Morning, class. Today we have an interesting exercise as well as the announcement that I've decided to expand our activities a bit. There'll be some shifting of computers and other technology this weekend as I have this entire department to use and we've been more or less keeping to this room. I felt it might be more productive to change things around a bit. More on that later."

Lighting a cigarette for himself, he waved to the students. "Today I want you to choose an article from today's or yesterday's headline at the The New York Times website. Again, the login is jerusalem_s and the password is fandomhigh. Once you've chosen an article I want you to go on-line and search for two other articles on the same topic. Please be certain they are not merely re-postings of the same article, by the way. Compare all three articles as far as differences and similiarites. As a great many sources simply lift from the wire services, you will get more credit for this assignment if you choose independant reports."

Grinning, he concluded, "I want to hear what you think about the various reports, how they could have been improved on or what you might have said in their place."

Comments

[jerusalem-s.livejournal.com]

Waiting until Chihaya was obviously well and truly frustrated, Spider came to look over his shoulder. "Problems?"

[positive-angel.livejournal.com]

"Yessir," Chihaya says glumly. "I have what I want to discuss but when I try to find other articles on the same subject, all I'm getting is stuff written months ago." He shoves at the papers again. "It's about the same subject sort of but I don't know..."

On his desk are the three things he picked out. The New York Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/09/politics/09detain.html) and two (http://www.president-bush.com/torture-waterboarding.html) others (http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/735/1/80/).

[jerusalem-s.livejournal.com]

Scanning the articles, Spider nodded. "I see your point. The articles are well-chosen, nonetheless. If you want timeliness, however, you might want to try one of these (http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&tab=nn&ie=UTF-8&ncl=http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/1788) articles. If none of them support as well as the older ones, however, I'd stick to what you have. Sometimes older can be more accurate, as newer articles are hastily thrown together to get onto a hot-topic bandwagon."

[positive-angel.livejournal.com]

"Thank you, sir," he says. Chihaya huffs out a breath and blows his bangs out of his face. "I'll try it again." He goes back to reading, working and making notes.