Journalism

JR 107 - Introduction to Mass Communications - Margaretha Geertsema ~ View Section Statements

JR 107 - Introduction to Mass Communications - Ed Kanis ~ View Section Statements

JR 112 - Writing for the Print Media - Margaretha Geertsema ~ View Section Statements

JR 112 - Writing for the Print Media - Nancy Whitmore ~ View Section Statements

Kwadwo Anokwa

Course Description and Purpose: Journalism 212 is the second of a four-sequence course in news writing and reporting required of journalism, and public and corporate communication majors. The thrust of the course is news reporting, with emphasis on techniques of gathering information for news stories, including interviewing, developing sources, documentary research, direct observation, and beat coverage. Students develop news judgment while proposing and preparing stories intended for publication.

Since you have already completed JR112, you should know the basics of news writing and reporting. This course is intended to polish those skills and master the essentials. Specifically, students will be expected to be able to:

• Continue to write stories that are free of mechanical errors, AP style errors, errors of omission, copy preparation errors, spelling errors, punctuation and grammar errors, usage errors, and factual errors
• Take notes accurately and thoroughly from exercises dictated in lab, from press conferences presented in lectures, during interviews conducted face-to-face or on the telephone, and during meetings
• Conduct multiple source interviews for news and feature stories
• Know where and how to find and develop ideas for news and feature stories
• Know how to locate and verify information for news and feature stories
• Know how to locate and verify information through sources such as telephone directories, city directories, almanacs, public records, news clips and the internet
• Learn and develop techniques of observation as a means of gathering information for news and features stories
• Use the telephone and internet for gathering information for news and feature stories
• Increase ability to use numbers accurately, including survey results, and make them meaningful in stories
• Be familiar with the concept of libel, privacy and ethics as they apply to reporting news and feature stories
• Increase ability to gather information and write stories under deadline pressure
• Be self-critical in editing and evaluating your own work
• Accept criticism of instructor and respond to instructor's suggestions
• Develop ideas for publishable news or feature stories
• Work with editors to get your stories published
• Increase knowledge of AP style through quizzes and by using proper style in all stories

Walt Stutz

Course Description and Purpose: Advertising is a challenging topic to address, in part, because of its ever-changing nature in practice. These changes are in response to many issues, but primarily to business and industry's emphasis on global marketing strategies and to the influence of emerging technologies. What this course can and will do; however, is provide an overview of the foundational principles of advertising and the necessary strategies and tools to address these changes.

The course has five key objectives:

• To understand the business of advertising, as well as the economic, social, legal, and ethical environment in which advertising operates.
• To understand the role of advertising within the integrated marketing communication strategy.
• To identify the key steps in the development of effective advertising campaigns.
• To understand the role of strategic thinking in advertising development and how this strategic thinking can become the foundation for effective, results-oriented creative.
• To understand the creative process of advertising and the challenges of making a vision become concrete.

Robert Norris

Course Description and Purpose: An introduction to the terms and practice of public relations. The class includes the history and theories of public relations, plus ethical and legal constraints, common contexts, and strategic practice.

The course has four key objectives:

• To understand the evolution and current function of public relations.
• To understand the process through which public relations performs its function.
• To understand the context within which public relations operates.
• To identify the skills required of public relations practitioners and trends that may influence those skills.

Marc Allan

Clear, concise, thoughtful writing is the centerpiece of a liberal arts education . Feature Writing will focus on telling great stories. Course participants will be taught the fundamentals of researching and writing feature stories for the print and electronic media. These will include personality profiles, writing "off the news," crowd stories and more. Students who complete the course will have enhanced skills in gathering and presenting information in an entertaining way that will interest readers

Charles R. St. Cyr

Journalists are individuals who seek through effective use of language to explore, interpret, and represent the complexity of the human condition. To communicate clearly and accurately the journalist relies on language. Consistent with the emphasis on language in the liberal arts, the meaning of words, their integration into cogent sentences, and the incorporation of sentences into coherent paragraphs together constitute the fundamental elements of the narrative story form in journalism.

Journalism 311 is the third course in a four-course sequence in newsreporting and writing required of journalism students. Journalism 311 introduces students to fundamental editing principles associated with Associated Press style, grammar, punctuation, spelling, editing text for accuracy, clarity, brevity and avoidance of libel, headline writing, photo editing, photo captions, news budget development, and news page design.

Journalism 311 attempts to develop in students the basic skills and critical judgment associated with the role of a copy editor at a daily newspaper. The primary emphasis is on learning to think and act like an editor. An editor is a person who relies on knowledge derived from the social sciences and humanities, including language skills, to assess, improve or rejectnews about complex local, state, regional, national and global realities.

The versatility and responsibility associated with editing is most compatible with a liberal arts education.

Mary Ann Carter

Course Description and Purpose: The purpose of the course is to explore non-verbal communication, to learn the value of photography in communicating ideas and information, to learn how to meld words and pictures to communicate most effectively, to learn the basics of digital camera usage and a digital workflow, to learn the basics of Adobe Photoshop, to learn to tell stories visually.

How the study of photojournalism fits into a liberal arts education: During the Age of Enlightenment, liberal arts expanded to include the study of science and humanities. The humanities involve studies of the human condition and include philosophy, performing arts, religion, social sciences and visual arts. Photography is the most recent addition to the visual arts and it gives us a window into every activity of man. Photography, although superficially a technical and aesthetic pursuit, is actually the study of man. Photojournalists in particular strive not only to capture the history of a time, they also strive to provide insight into the human condition. As distinguished photographer Edward Steichen explained, ""Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man" and "It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding." The aesthetic tools the photographer uses are as ancient as humankind and the development of civilization. They help us to understand and process what we see. The ancient Greeks studied The Golden Ratio which is still used today as the basis for the shape of 35mm format in photography and as a method of composing images that are aesthetically pleasing. The German mathematician Johannes Kepler said "Geometry has two great treasures: one is the theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio [The Golden Ratio]. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel." The original seven liberal arts, of which geometry is one, focused on mathematics and language.

And in the last century we began to discover that photography is also an expression of a visual language that we all speak. Although there are nuances of difference across cultures, this language stands the greatest and most immediate chance of communicating across the boundaries of traditional language, physical and political boundaries, and social and economic divisions. Photography has evolved into not just a tool for understanding but for creating and communicating as well.

Donna Gray

Course Description and Purpose: Advertising is a key marketing strategy for both established companies and brands along with start-ups, not-for profits and other organizations. In today's highly competitive marketplace and increasingly cluttered messaging arena, businesses and organizations are challenged to reach their target audiences in meaningful ways. Not only does advertising have to attract attention; it has to deliver measurable return on investment.

This course will provide opportunities to learn/apply foundations for building successful advertising campaigns, including: Strategy development; Media research and selection; Creative development and production; and Measurement/ROI

The course has four key objectives:

• Demonstrate understanding of brand development and strategy
• Demonstrate understanding of advertising strategy
• Produce effective advertising concepts and creative executions
• Demonstrate understanding of media strategy development

Joseph Smith

JR322 will explore a practical approach to advertising copywriting through the development of creative strategy and hands-on copywriting experience. This course will include applications to various print and electronic media. We will look at early advertising examples and as well as contemporary advertising works and develop our own writing styles within the disciplines of sound strategic thinking.

In advertising copywriting, one cannot separate thinking and writing. The non-communicated concept is useless. The art director has visual image, the writer must rely on powerful words composed into a compelling selling message. We will discuss in class the generation of ideas (and we will generate ideas in class). We will also examine the creative process a good advertising writer goes through to create original thinking for original advertising.

Rose Campbell

This course is positioned in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. As such, it is designed to instill the analytical skills associated with education in the liberal arts, through examination of our own beliefs and values in concert with those expressed by the actions of others. What does it mean in terms of this particular course? We not only will examine measurably successful and unsuccessful examples of public relations practices, but we also will evaluate the cases from the perspective of responsible public relations in the broad context of human experience. With this in mind, I will do my best to create an environment of intellectual openness and inquiry. We may not find answers to all of your questions, but we will develop a set of conditional answers that will help you develop both effective and ethical decision-making and problem-solving skills, whether you choose a career in public relations, another field, or plan to continue your education after graduation.

Following this model, JR324 is designed to help you: integrate learning from a broad range of topics and courses, create opportunities for lifelong education through service learning values, hone skills in effective reasoning based on experiential and theoretical frameworks, and develop global awareness and intercultural sensitivity. (Following this will be a list of specific applied skill-sets that also are to be developed in the course, related to its intensive-writing course designation.)

Steve Vibbert

This course examines common approaches to research in public relations and advertising. These approaches include the uses of informal scanning, situation analyses, focus groups, and questionnaire-centered approaches to information gathering and assessment. You must have a grade of C or better in JR 112, and JR 221 or JR 223 to enroll.

The course has the following goals:

• To reveal the role that research plays in public relations and advertising.
• To understand common types of research used in these areas.
• To prepare for the creation and criticism of research in these areas.
• To develop critical, analytic, writing, and presentational skills about research topics.

Ed Kanis

Course Objectives:

• To develop knowledge of and skills in public relations writing and judgment.
• To plan and prepare materials to communicate with various audiences.
• To organize information effectively and clearly.
• To perform under deadline pressures similar to those a professional experiences.
• To develop effective written communication skills that demonstrate sound critical thinking as well as professional language rules.
• To gain added confidence as a professional writer.
• To produce quality writing samples that can used to develop a professional portfolio.
• To prepare students to exercise influence on managerial decisions by producing PR writing that represents sound analysis and thereby contributes to organizational objectives.

This course will be taught primarily through an applied laboratory approach. Lecture, class discussion and critiques of student and professional public relations writing and judgment are also used to develop the knowledge and writing skills necessary to communicate strategically with various audiences. Developing these critical thinking and analytical abilities is consistent with the goals of a liberal arts education.

Charles R. St. Cyr

Disciplinary Objectives

Journalists are individuals who through exposure to the social sciences and humanities are intellectually prepared to examine and interpret the complexity of the human condition. Consistent with the liberal arts, the journalist is expected to value inquiry and social responsibility. Socially responsible journalism is predicated on the spirit of human discovery, open-mindedness, freedom of inquiry, critical analysis, respect for diversity, and truthful, accurate written or verbal communication. Journalism is liberal arts praxis.

Journalism 412, the capstone course of the news-editorial sequence, is designed to engage students in one specific aspect of the liberal arts tradition: the reporting and writing of news about public affairs that reflect the performance of democratic institutions. Reporting and news writing skills are developed by confronting the challenges of identifying and producing publishable real-world news stories. Students select an area community to cover and report about schools, crime, police, courts, and local government in that community. Government includes mayors, city councils, and agencies that deal with the environment, public health, social welfare, public transportation or other substantive public issues.

Students learn how to find stories, cover local government meetings, interview local officials, find public records, use open records laws and the Freedom of Information Act, and write clear and interesting stories about serious topics, significant events, or interesting people involved in community issues. The use of the Internet as a reporting tool is a vital component of the course.

Success in Journalism 412 requires a genuine and semester-long commitment to the challenges and demands of news reporting. Students must demonstrate that they can think and act like beginning reporters on a real news staff. Reporting skills are given primary emphasis. Those skills are premised on values normally associated with a liberal arts education.

Nancy Whitmore

This course is intended to provide journalism students with a basic understanding of media law as it has developed and is developing in the United States. It is a survey course which focuses on the major legal principles and standards underlying the free speech/press clause of the First Amendment as well as the major legal issues confronting mass communicators, including libel, invasion of privacy, access to information, trespass, hidden cameras and wiretapping, journalist privilege, free press/fair trial, commercial speech and regulation, intellectual property law, and obscenity. The central purpose of the course is to acquire a working knowledge of the major legal principles and standards of mass communication law. A secondary purpose is to foster problem-solving and critical analysis of specific factual situations that are constrained by the law. In other words, students should begin to think and reason like an attorney and to remove or eliminate opinion/individual bias from legal thinking. Lastly, the course is intended to expand your understanding of the American legal system and the role of precedent and legal reasoning in the development of law.

As future mass communicators, it is important for journalism students to understand the complexity or "grayness" of speech/press freedoms and the challenge the delineation of those freedoms presents to a legal system. Such an understanding fosters an intellectual resilience against the vagaries of popular notions and explanations of complicated legal issues. It is this resiliency that embraces the spirit of a liberal education.

Charles R. St. Cyr

The art and craft of journalism are rooted in the liberal arts. Journalists are individuals who through exposure to the social sciences and humanities are intellectually and morally prepared to examine and interpret the complexity of the human condition. Consistent with the liberal arts, the journalist is expected to value a professional code of conduct based on sound moral principles and demonstrate respect for accurate written or verbal communication. Socially responsible journalism is predicated on the spirit of human discovery, open-mindedness, freedom of inquiry, critical analysis, respect for diversity, and truthful representation. Journalism is liberal arts praxis.

Journalism 416 is designed to engage students in critical examination of one specific aspect of that liberal arts tradition: the professional ethics associated with the creation and dissemination of news. Professional ethics address not only what is reported and why, but also how journalists should act in interaction with members of society and why.

Social ethics is about doing the right thing based on clearly articulated moral standards. Ethics is not about what is legal. In fact, what is legal actually may not be what is right. Common journalistic practices or routine journalistic behaviors may have legal protection but may be based on questionable ethical principles - perhaps even few, if any, ethics.

In the competitive world of modern news media and the 24-hour news cycle, ethical decision-making is perhaps more important than ever but rarely is it simple or straightforward. No one ethical rule fits all situations all journalists encounter. However, the social impact of media ethics - or ethical lapses - can be substantial.

Journalism 416 asks students to critically reflect on media values, social values, and their interaction with an eye toward a more refined understanding of media ethics and a more critical assessment of media performance. The course asks students to frame a perspective about media ethics based on one central question: "What is the right thing for a journalist to do and why?

Margaretha Geertsema

JR417 is designed to introduce you to important issues and topics in international communication in the era of globalization. The course is divided into two parts:

1. The historical context of and theoretical approaches to international communication in general
2. Case studies, topics, and issues of representation in international journalism in particular

The course will help you understand contemporary debates, including those related to cultural imperialism, development, the information society, and the digital divide. It will prepare you to enter the workplace with a heightened awareness of global issues and an understanding of how they might impact you.

Within the context of a liberal arts education, this course will encourage you to think critically and independently about international communication in general and journalism in particular, to evaluate the cultural implications of various forms of international communication, to understand the impact of media globalization on you as a citizen and consumer; and to imagine an international communication system that would include the voices of those who are typically excluded

JR 426 - Sports Writing ~ View Section Statements

JR 426 - Information Design in an Interactive Age ~ View Section Statements