The First Step

Welcome to Convergent Journalism I, your first step toward more professional writing!

Catalog Description: “Convergent Journalism I is an introductory writing course in the field of journalism designed to introduce students to the basic principles and techniques of news writing and reporting in a converged media society. Students will learn the necessary writing skills for various media; journalistic skills as well as ethics in journalism.”

Professor’s Description: My overall goal is to teach you to be professionals in whatever field of communications you ultimately decide to enter. Your sophomore year is the time to begin seeing yourself in the role of a professional communicator: how to look, how to act, how to work, how to advance, how to be successful. Whether you ultimately choose to enter the field of journalism or not, the skills you learn in this course will serve you for years to come in any area of business or corporate life. Professional-level writing – clean, clear, accurate and fair – will set you apart.

To achieve that goal, we will work hard on the mechanics of good writing: proper grammar, punctuation, word choice and A.P. style. I also will teach you the handful of story forms that every journalist must know: news advancers, speech stories, obituaries, news profiles, and so on. I have developed a way of teaching these story forms that I call the Road Map Method, and you will leave here with sturdy templates that can be expanded and adapted to every assignment an editor might throw your way. You will never have to guess at how to get started or where the story is going because the Road Map will tell you.

This course’s title makes reference to “convergent journalism,” meaning you will learn how to present your reporting in various media, whether traditional print or online or in broadcast form. In addition to the shorter daily stories you write, you will work on what newspaper journalists call “a take-out,” meaning a longer, more thoroughly reported story. You will present your major term project in three formats: a print version using InDesign, an online version using Blogger.com and a broadcast version using Premiere video editing software. This major project – which will be a news profile on a subject of your choosing – will become your mid-term and final exams for the course.

Besides the tools mentioned above, we will immerse ourselves in some of the emerging new technologies that journalists, even at traditional news outlets, are using today to reach wider and younger audiences. These will include using Twitter to blast out news updates, using Videolicious.com to report fast-breaking news, using Steller.com to create interactive slide shows and Storify.com to turn social media into news platforms.

Finally, throughout the semester, you will create and build a high-quality blog that will become a showcase for your work as you continue on your path toward graduation. I cannot emphasize enough how important this blog can be for advancing your educational and professional goals. It can help you get a job! Three examples of three recent HPU grads who used their blogs from last year to land their first jobs: Daniel S. Walker, who used his blog on politics to get a job in the office of Sen. Richard Burr in Washington; Olivia French, who used her feature-writing blog to help her get a job writing for Scholastic Publications; and Tyler Sekula, who used his sports commentary blog to help him get accepted into the sports management program at the University of Texas-Austin.

I am here to help you follow in the footsteps of those successful students. Your life as a professional communicator is only three years away. We’ll start working toward it in this course. You’ll be able to envision it by the end of this semester!