JRN 2201 TU Chinese Students Think About the School Closure Order Interview Questions

Please upload your finished version of the story here as an attached file compatible with Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx, .rtf or .txt).

***In the comments for the assignment, you must provide the names and phone numbers of ALL of your sources.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Find and interview no fewer than five people of your choice on a topic also of your choice. The interviews must produce at least enough intelligence for you to be able to produce an interesting and unified story.

For example, you might wish to interview students, faculty and staff about parking issues on the Troy campus, about online learning, about the pace of summer classes as they differ from fall and spring semester classes, or about whether and why students prefer to live on or off campus. (Please do not use any of these topics, be creative and find your own.)

You may not interview any student in this class, nor any Troy journalism student. If you interview your friends, partners, roommates, classmates or professional associates, you will need that many additional sources for this story. In other words, friends, family, classmates and roommates do not count as sources for this story.

All interviews must be conducted in person (face to face while masked and socially distant, through video calls or on the telephone), and each interview subject must be made to understand why he is being interviewed and that his responses may be published.

All sources must be clearly identified by first and last name. Remember that students should also be identified by their class rank (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior), major and hometown. Non-students should be identified in a way that readers understand why they were interviewed for your story (Troy professor, Montgomery doctor).

You may not quote at length from a newspaper, the Internet or other media, and you may not lift quotes or other information from such sources. Gather your own information from your own sources. If you must include secondary material, it must be fully credited to the original publication.

You will develop your own story idea for this assignment. The hypothetical audience for this story is Troy University’s award-winning Tropolitan newspaper, so you will want to cover something that is of interest to its target readership — students on the Troy campus. That doesn’t mean you can’t write a story with an international angle as we have students at Troy from all over the globe!

Your story must meet these additional requirements:

• Use correct AP style.
• Include at least one hyperlink (be sure to look at the course resources for instructions).
• Double-space and indent paragraphs, using the software settings we have discussed in class (look at the course resources).
• Make sure your name is on your assignment.
• Save your file with the name: MidtermProject_Lastname_Firstname
• Length: 500 to 600 words.
• Sources: No story should depend on just one source. Single-source stories fail to explore alternative sides to the issue, plus they frequently fail to hold the reader’s attention. Even stories about speeches or meetings should be balanced by indicating conflicting opinions or including reaction. Stories should reflect the sense that issues are multifaceted; journalists do this by including sources whose positions, background, knowledge and interests give them reason to know and understand the issues and the impact of the issues. You are expected to do sufficient reporting to understand the viewpoints of the principal characters and to include the range of positions in this and all of your stories.

List the names and phone numbers of all sources at the end of the story. Failure to do this will result in a one-letter-grade reduction. You should not be surprised if your professor calls these sources to verify the accuracy of the information in your report.

Fabrication: Journalists deal in facts, not fiction. If you make up a source, event, quote or story and your professor catches you, you will receive a ZERO for this assignment, plus you and your story will be turned over to the director of the Hall School of Journalism and Communication for further disciplinary action. Faking facts is wrong; it can destroy careers and harm the credibility of your publication. The Hall School of Journalism and Communication will not tolerate fabrication of sources, events, quotes and story elements under any circumstances.

Plagiarism: All work for this story (and all other projects for the Hall School of Journalism) must be your own, original effort. Plagiarism will be dealt with severely.

Deadline: The penalty for late projects and assignments is described in your syllabus. Don’t miss the deadline, or your grade will suffer. File your story through Canvas as an attached file in one of these formats compatible with Microsoft Word: .doc, .docx, .rtf or .txt.

Grading: Your grade for this project will be based largely on the strength of your story. Your story will be assigned a letter grade.

The emphasis in grading your stories will be on strength of reporting, organization, accuracy, clarity, appropriateness of style for topic, tightness, thoroughness, word usage and readability, but you also will be graded on mechanics, grammar and AP style.

You will receive an automatic “F” for this story if it contains a statement that could be libelous or an error in fact, including a misspelling of a proper name. Be careful, and check your facts and the spellings of the names.