Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Your Final Blog

This is it. Your Final Blog!

The purpose of this blog is to reflect on the work you’ve done this quarter. It can include:

1. Links to something you’ve done on Hoofprint.net that you're proud of with a description of the type of work you’ve done this year on Hoofprint.net

2. Links to your favorite blog or blogs and a description of your growth and development as a blogger.

3. A description of what you've thought about throughout the class.

4. A summary of what you’ve learned and gained in the class as well as what you contributed.

5. A final statement about what you have contributed and produced. You don’t have to give your self a grade. This should be more of a narrative.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Blog #11: Where do you get your news

Due Date: Sunday, May 27
Word Count: At least 400
Links: At least 2

Before you write, you should take this quiz from the Pew Research Center. Take note of how you did compared with the rest of the country.

I got them all right, so take that.




You've spent the last 10 days being exposed to news that comes from sources you don't typically consult. You've hopefully learned something or evolved in your way of thinking about news in general.

When you think back on your experience, what conclusions can you come to about;

  • The purpose or biases of your news source,

  • The point of news,

  • The importance of news,

  • Your attitudes toward news,

  • Whether you'd keep looking for news,

  • Where people should look for news,

  • or anything else.


Once you've thought about your own reactions, take a stab at one of the questions you came up with as a group at the start of last week. What meaningful conclusions can you come to?

Why does news matter?

Why is news so depressing?

Why is “cute cats” news?

How much of news is entertainment?

Who defines news?

Are you better off if you’re up to date on news?
Are you worse off knowing?

Why are there so many places to get news, why not narrow it down to five?

Does anything change when you’re looking at news?

How does news make you feel?

How does it benefit you?

How can you make others better through your knowledge?

Why do we get so interested in things that are none of our business?

Monday, March 26, 2012

Blog 7: The Happiness of Pursuit

Due Date: Thursday, March 29 by Midnight
Word Count: 350 minimum
Links: At least one link to your own blog, at least one link to another blog, at least one link to an outside source.

Over the course of the first term of Journalism 2, we've considered a variety of topics. Some of the concepts we've tackled are;

  • What is truth?

  • What is journalism?

  • What is the future of journalism?

  • What does it mean to be a reader or a consumer of media in the 21st Century?

  • The role of design in your life and in media

  • Media ownership

  • Gatekeepers

  • Choice


We've also worked each week on producing content for Hoofprint.net. You've had the chance to publish something on a consistent basis this quarter and deal with the struggle in finding news and producing quality work quickly.

Your task this week is to write a blog post that either

  1. introduces a question based loosely on what we've been doing for the last eight weeks,

  2. summarizes your thinking about Journalism, writing and reading, being a consumer (or producer) of media,

  3. combines multiple topics into a single post, or

  4. goes more in depth with an issue you've been thinking more about.


As always, you are free to take a creative approach with this topic and you are definitely welcome to scrap the questions and come up with your own idea. This blog should showcase your talents as a thinker and your ability to make sense of multiple ideas in a single piece of writing.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Reflection: Newspaper of the Future

Due: Sunday, March 18
Word Count: 300
Please Include: Any images of your project or presentation

You're entry this week is a reflection on your Newspaper of the Future project.

Please explain what your group created and why you thought it would be an essential ways for people to get or interact with news. Describe the thought process that went in to creating this project and the ideas or work you contributed to the project.

Reflections:


Here’s a sample portfolio piece and reflection.

  • A reflection should accompany each entry into your portfolio.

  • Write about what you did, the things you learned along the way, what you think you did well and what areas you still have for improvement.

  • What would you do differently if you could do it again?

  • How can it be applied to future projects and layouts?


Possible Reflection Questions:


From your experiences creating this project;

  1. What have you come to understand about newspapers right now?

  2. What are the main struggles you had making a newspaper people would buy and advertisers would support?

  3. What are newspapers going to struggle with in the near future?

  4. What did you base your ideas for design on?

  5. Which group was the closest to getting things right?

  6. What are your main conclusions about the future of print news?