I am very proud of your work. You started a month ago with nothing but an idea, and used your journalistic and web skills to create interesting projects.

Please take a look at your fellow classmates’ work and offer comments on each site. Put on your editor’s hat and offer positive feedback as well as constructive criticism. How does the site look? Are the headlines appropriate and interesting? What could be improved on this project? Thanks, everyone.

Aaron Hobbs:  The Amethyst Initiative.

Frank Godinho: UMass Goes Green

Kaitlyn Silva: OIT Brings Technology to UMass

Rich Lombard: UMass Students and the Presidential Election

Lucas Correia: The Amethyst Initiative

Elyse Wood: Massachusetts Ballot Referendum, Question One

Brian Wood: Campus Crime at UMass

Hollis Smith: Farming in the Pioneer Valley 

Michael Teneriello: Campus Crime at UMass

Michael Messina: Campus Improvements at UMass

Here’s some interesting research on optimal line width for copy meant to be read on a monitor. The upshot: 4-5 inches wide is best.

Here’s another site. Is 60-80 characters best?

Here it the link to  Podcast Solutions, an E-book.

Please read chapters 1-4 by Monday.

OIT has two handouts you should also read. They are here.

Here’s the ITunes guide to podcasts. Please go to the ITunes store, find a journalism-style or personal journal podcast that you love, and post the link and a comment on it by 6 p.m. on Thursday. Over the weekend, please log on and try to listen to a few.

Go to Poynter.org News U and take the workshop on legal issues for bloggers. Here’s the link.

I love Wired Magazine, so I was interested to see this interview with contributing editor Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.

FYI: Follow the above link to Amazon, where Howe converses with readers who have bought his book. You should do this when you publish your book!

In this interview, Howe talks about the pros and cons of user generated content and crowdsourcing. Newspapers, magazines and journalists ignore the trend at their peril, he says.

Journalism Program
Fall 2008: Magazine Writing, Writing for the Web
B.J. Roche

Questions to Ask When Revising Your Work

Most of writing is revising, so it’s important to develop your own method for identifying and fixing what’s wrong with your first, second, third, fourth or tenth draft. Read the rest of this entry »

THREE PART SERIES

OPENING STORY
Lays out the topic, provides the foundation

700 WORDS
70 lines
Four sections of  about 18 lines each
LEAD AND NUT GRAF
Anecdote, scene, summary
Nut graf: tells what the story is, answers the question: why read this, why now?
ELABORATION ON LEAD
Take the story forward from the scene or anecdote in the lead
Builds the evidence: three points you want to make
BACKGROUND
Tells  how we got here
Deeper background
CONCLUSION
Summarizes, looks forward
Kicker quote to end story with a bang

BUILDING YOUR NARRATIVE
Mix of expository grafs and quotes
Set a scene
Active verbs and concrete nouns

Here’s an online conversation posted Monday, October 6 that former Washington Post editor Len Downie had with readers, about what they’re looking for in their summer internship applicants. Worth a read!