Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century 2013 | Page 5

Volume 2, 2013

Page 5

First place, graduate-student division

Today’s journalist challenge:
Write better, adapt faster,
promote smarter
By Ioana Coman
University of Tennessee
Types of courses the idea could be used in:
newswriting, reporting, editing
Target level: freshmen, sophomores, juniors,
seniors and graduate students in a professionally
oriented program
What is the goal of the assignment or exercise?
Learning how to write and report news in
today’s constantly changing and challenging
media environment is essential to any media
student’s education. Students attain how to
collaboratively report news in today’s challenging
media environment. I designed this “writing
assignment” portion of the grading schema with
three student-learning outcomes in mind: Media
writing best practices, adaptation of writing to
multiple platforms and promotion of news stories
online.
How does the assignment or exercise work?
First phase: I divided the class into two teams,
and I verified that both teams contained at least
one person with copy-editing experience and one
person with photo and video-editing experience.
Both groups then established their team name and
created a blog using Wordpress.
Second phase: Teams were responsible for
uploading stories onto their blogs and promoting
these posts using Twitter, Facebook and other
applicable social media. I mandated that students
post one story per week, but their particular
roles in content creation were guided by a
weekly rotation: Editor, writer, photographer/
videographer. The lab portion of class was
designated as a time for “editorial meetings,”
when students could edit and upload stories while
under supervised interaction.
Third phase: I determined the winning team
as the group with the best news content (quality
of the story, news values, etc.) combined with
the highest blog traffic and online promotion

execution. Members of the winning team received
an A (90–100 grading scale) for the “writing
assignment” portion of their class grade. Members
of the non-winning team were graded individually
on their story content (quality of the story, news
values, etc.).
How is the assignment innovative?
The assignment teaches students how to be
good writers while focusing on how to promote
their news stories in an environment where the
competition is fierce and being social-media
savvy is a required skill. I also noticed that they
paid more attention to proper attribution of
their sources since the finished product was not
contained in the class setting.
What pitfalls have you encountered in using the
idea and how did you overcome them?
A struggle for me was to have less control
of the finished product because I did not assign,
read, or edit the stories before they went live on
each team’s blog. Additionally, students were not
used to having so much control over their work
and had to shift into the decision-maker role.
Having lab time to work on the stories helped
bridge this gap because I was there to answer any
question and help them through.
What is the impact of the assignment?
The students loved the assignment. They had
the chance to take ownership of the work since
they were deciding on the stories, writing them,
and promoting them. The assignment also allowed
them to easily show peers, friends, family, etc. the
skills they were learning in school. Quotes from
students’ feedback include:
— “I like the blog project. It gives us
management experience along with reporting.”
— “It’s like real world experience but on a
small scale.”
— “I actually really enjoy the project we’re
doing, I feel a lot more productive now than I did
before we started the project.”

Ioana Alexandra Coman
is a Ph.D. student and
graduate teaching associate in the School of
Journalism and Electronic
Media at the University
of Tennessee. She studies
crisis and risk communication, social and new
media, international
communication, and
mass media and political
systems.
She earned her master’s
degree at Tennessee and
her undergraduate degree
from the University of
Bucharest in Romania.