News literacy is an important part of journalism and liberal arts education. Adapting a tool called the Frayer Model, the activity guides students in developing a conceptual understanding of news by creating a definition, listing essential characteristics, and coming up with examples and non-examples. This activity is intended to set the stage for…

The author of this article describes an upper-level economics course where students learn to write economic news articles, which improves communication and audience-targeting skills. The course was created in partnership with a media outlet and designed around authentic assessments to provide students with a genuine experience based on academic…

A class newsletter can help students learn about each other while they gain important social, writing, and interviewing techniques. Computer programs to produce a newsletter, to do word processing, and to manage data are described. (MT)

Given the increasing influence of public journalism on the daily routines of newspapers across the United States, students need to be taught how to find a workable balance between consulting and reporting on conventional information sources and consulting and reporting on the perspectives provided by ordinary citizens. This paper discusses ways in…

This activity helps students understand the relationship between public relations (PR) writing and news writing by demonstrating how PR material gets used in the production of news stories. Considering that "more than 70 percent of daily newspaper copy emanates from PR-generated releases," it is important for students to learn how PR professionals…

Describes a workshop recommended for the beginning of each term to orient journalism students to the use of computers for news writing. (HTH)

Describes a three and one half hour class in which students must rewrite stories for four editions of a daily newspaper, with updates on a fire in progress, press releases, and obituaries added during the class period. (HTH)

Notes that the ways in which feature stories "go wrong" tend to cluster into patterns, and presents a classroom developed list of tag-words and one-line definitions for marking feature assignments and use in group critiques. (HTH)

The goal of the studio-workshop approach proposed in this booklet for speech communication instructors is to revitalize the ancient study of rhetoric by incorporating modern principles of behavioral science, informal information exchange, and mass media into the oral communication curriculum. The first section discusses communication theories and…

Uses poetry and skeletal outlines of similes to stimulate students' use of imagery in their feature writing. (HTH)

Presents an exercise in which students must write five broadcast leads from five of the major newspaper stories reported on the day they were born. (HTH)

Describes a newswriting exercise to teach coverage of public speaking events in which students were asked to report on Jesus Christ's Sermon on the Mount. (HTH)

Presents an editorial assignment that addresses students' inability to formulate and stick to a theme, and their lack of tight writing, by highlighting the similarities between editorial writing and magazine writing. (HTH)

Explains the technique "editorial step-asides," which is designed to help students learn the difference between fact and opinion in a teacher's lecture. (FL)

Suggests having students write short summaries using the principles of the journalistic news "lead" to help them sharpen their abstraction skills. Includes samples of data blocks from which students would compose their summaries, kernel sentences from the samples, "kernel" kernel sentences, first draft summaries, and 30-word…