Teaching News Terrifically in the 21st Century 2013 | Page 8

Page 8

Volume 2, 2013

Third place, full-time faculty division (tie)

The Red Line Project:
Teaching in the 21st Century
By Michael Reilley
DePaul University
Types of courses the idea could be used in:
newswriting, reporting
Target level: juniors, seniors

Mike Reilley teaches
Online Journalism I
and II, News Editing,
Multiplatform News
Editing, Reporting for
Converged Newsrooms
and Online Sports and
advises DePaul’s Society
of Professional Journalists
chapter. The organization
was named SPJ National
Campus Chapter of the
Year in 2011 and 2013. He
is a former reporter and
copy editor at the Los Angeles Times and was one
of the founding editors of
ChicagoTribune.com. He’s
a former news editor at
WashingtonPost.com and
ran the 2000 Summer
Olympics copy desk for
AOL. Reilley also founded
the journalism research
site, The Journalist’s Toolbox, which he sold to the
Society of Professional
Journalists in 2007
and continues to
update for SPJ.

What is the goal of the assignment or
exercise?
Provide in-depth coverage of an urban issue using multimedia storytelling tools. Typically, it’s a group
of students covering a topic (such as gun violence in
Chicago) using digital storytelling tools.
The goal: a published piece about Chicago’s gun
violence problems on our community news and urban
issues website, The Red Line Project (http://www.
redlineproject.org), which I built with my Online II
students two years ago. (The gun violence project was
in Winter Quarter 2013, during the middle of one
of the largest spikes in gun-related homicides in the
city’s history. President Obama came to the city to
discuss gun control, and we covered it along with our
in-depth package on gun violence.)
How does the assignment or exercise work?
We started by researching the issue of gun
violence and divided up the assignments among the
students. Then, I started training them on various
multimedia tools we used: video (Final Cut Pro), Meograph, Google Fusion Tables. I brought in journalists and experts as guest speakers. I took some of the
students to a Community Media Workshop panel on
gun violence in week 4 of the quarter to research and
make contact with sources.
We met outside of our weekly Wednesday night
class (typically on Friday mornings) to go over progress and sketch out project structure. The students not
only reported and produced the work, they also built
it on the site in our Surreal CMS content management
system. The professor acted in the role of editor and
tech trouble-shooter.
The project was published in early March at
http://www.redlineproject.org/gunviolence.php It has
received nearly 35, 000 page views as of May 28.
How is the assignment innovative? What mak