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Program Requirements
Overview
Course Descriptions
Class Readings
Internships
Checklist for Majors
Journalism Resources
Job-Hunting Tips |
Journalism Reading: the Basics
Most UNH journalism professors put their syllabi and other class materials
for a specific semester on Blackboard. On this page you'll find background
reading and resources that can help you with any journalism course. Be sure to
check out the longer list of Journalism Resources links at left as well; those are the
sites that working journalists use.
Useful
for all classes:
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Grades
and policies
For ALL
journalism courses at UNH,
plagiarizing or fabricating means you fail. No questions, no
excuses; if you steal or lie, you fail the course.
Plagiarism
means passing off someone else's work, published or
unpublished, as your own. According to UNH rules, it's also
plagiarism to submit work for one course that you've
previously submitted for another.
Fabrication is simply lying. Every person in your
stories must be a real person whom you actually interviewed,
and every word you attribute to a person must be something
that he or she actually said.
Many
people do not trust journalists. The only way we're going to
change that is by going out there and being journalists with
integrity, journalists whose behavior is beyond reproach.
Once you've shown that you will steal or lie, we can't send
you on an internship representing UNH.
How
621 stories are graded
(agreed
to by all 621 teachers)
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Some
(of the zillion) places to find story ideas
- 50
places to shop for story ideas
- Al's
Morning Meeting:
story
ideas posted every weekday morning by the Poynter
Institute. The Poynter site also has 90 million other
resources to help you.
- Go
to Google
News
and
type in "New Hampshire" (or "college students," or any
topic you're interested in). Spin off from what you find.
- Go
to the New
Hampshire state Web site
and
just start clicking. For
instance, you can look at the legislative calendar and
head to a hearing on an interesting bill.
- Read
UNH news releases on the News
Bureau site.
(Remember,
these are just ideas.)
- UNH
calendar
- Campus
Journal
online
newspaper for UNH faculty and staff. Or you can
subscribe
here
to
have e-mail sent to you when a new issue comes
out.
- Go
to seacoastonline.com
and
read not just the Portsmouth Herald but the local
weeklies (linked near the top).
- Foster's
Daily Democrat
of Dover.
- Check
the Web sites of local
towns .
-
Working reporters tell
where their ideas come from.
-
Beat reporting tips
-
Don’t wait for stories to knock on your door (hint: they won’t).
-
Creativity tools for journalists
- Stateline.org
has
politics and policy stories by state. Search for New
Hampshire, or do a NH story paralleling one from another
state.
-
Use
citizen
media Web sites.
- Join
the listserv
for the town of Durham.
Every Friday you'll get an e-mail listing meetings and
other happenings in town. To
subscribe,
send
e-mail to Town_of_Durham@ci.durham.nh.us . Type the word
SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Type nothing else; just
send.
- What
are other papers writing about?
newslink.org
links
to just about every paper in the world. What can you
localize?
- What
are other college papers writing about? One of
many
lists
of college papers online.
Or try headlines from the UWire.
- Go
to Slate
magazine
and click on "Today's
Papers,"
a
summary of what's in the major newspapers every day.
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621
Newswriting
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622
Advanced Newswriting
First
Amendment reading
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Readings
on storytelling
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More
reporting and writing advice:
How to make
your LEAD better
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Interviewing tips
(Note: The sites
connected to most of the articles below contain all
sorts of good stuff about journalism; stay with them
and poke around.)
- The
dance of interviewing, Part 1
(even though it's
labeled Part 2). And
Part
2.
(even though it's
labeled Part 1)
- The
really great interview
from the
Minneapolis Star Tribune. Open the pdf of the
newsroom's in-house newsletter at this
site.
- Rules
to interview by,
the Poynter Institute
- Loosening
Lips: The Art of the Interview
Seattle Times
The
First Rule: Be
Human.
(Note: This piece focuses
on a UNH grad, Meg Heckman.).
-
Ten
tips for a better
interview.
-
Getting
the most from your
interviews.
- Tips
for the process
from the Atlanta Journal
Constitution
- Tips
from the pros
- NOTE-TAKING
tips
- How to do
E-MAIL INTERVIEWS
- The
ZEN of interviewing
by a
sportswriter. Follow
the links at the bottom of this piece for other
interviewing tips.
- Handling emotional
interviews,
Part
1
and
Part
2
- Simple
questions reveal telling
details (tips
from a Providence Journal reporter, including the
story she wrote as a result of the
interview).
- How you
approach
people is
crucial.
- A
psychologist's
interview tips for
journalists
- Tom
French, one of
the great narrative journalists, with tips on
interviewing and other aspects of the writing
process
- The
lost art of
interviewing from
Columbia Journalism Review
- Shut
up and listen
-
And
another guy's Shut
up and
listen (This one's
more detailed, with links to other pieces.)
- To put it another way:
The
Power of LISTENING
- An
interview on a painful
subject, with the
resulting story.
- Newspaper
Interviewing 101.
It's for high school students, so it'll make you feel
smart.
- Crisis reporting and
respectful
interviewing.
- The "question man"
says you're asking
the wrong questions. This was a good piece about
reporter John Sawatsky that seems to have disappeared
from the Web. (It was in American Journalism
Review.) Brownie points to anyone who can find an
online copy.
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|
Program Requirements
Course Descriptions
Journalism Internships
Useful reading for all journalism courses
English 621 Newswriting
English 622 Advanced Newswriting
English 711 and 811 Editing
English 723 Issues in Journalism |
