This assignment incorporates: hards news writing for online, live Tweeting, and social media reporting. Each of these are different ways of covering the same one story or topic. This assignment is meant to assess your skill both with writing hard news that can run in an online context and your skill and understanding of how social media can be used to help report the news.
Part 1, Do Your Hard News Writing for Online: You will write a hard news story on a news, lifestyle, sports, or arts/entertainment topic or person of your choice that pertains to UNCC and could run in the Niner Times. The reporting must be original and your own. All sources, direct and indirect, must be cited. This needs to be hard-news or interview style – no opinion pieces.
Write the piece in a minimum of 250 words. It should be written in journalistic style, edited, and formatted as a news story for online. That means an online-appropriate headline, subhead, use of images, hyperlinks, etc. Again – this isn’t just a hard news story, it’s an online hard news story.
Part 2, Social Media: Once you have settled on a story topic and angle, if you don’t have a Twitter, you will need to create one for this assignment.
If you are Tweeting to a personal account, after screenshotting your live Tweets for submission purposes, feel free to erase these all from your feed. If you need to start one for this assignment, you can simply delete the account afterward. It doesn’t take any time to sign up.
“Live Tweeting” simply means engaging on Twitter by sending a series of tweets on various aspects of the event as it unfolds. This is likely to include sending out tweets about you’re reporting on, replying to tweets and retweeting relevant tweets. Here the steps you will take for this part of the assignment, where you live tweet.
– Find relevant hashtags.
– Set a timer for 25-35 minutes. This is the length of time you will be reporting on Twitter on your story.
– The first post should occur before the live reporting begins to indicate the fact that you’ll be live tweeting at a certain time.
– Set the scene: who/what/where/when/why/how/etc.
– Use one or more relevant hashtags in every tweet.
– There should be 5 Tweets total, minimum, that you post in this time frame.
Overall: You will craft a narrative by posting Tweets that do the following:
Cover an event or topic, note important moments, reflect on what the moments mean, quote people, raise questions, or give context whenever possible.
Avoid tweeting inaccurate information, libel, personal attacks, etc. If you must tweet an unconfirmed rumor, make it clear in your tweet that it’s unconfirmed, and ask for help confirming or debunking the info. When your time is up, screenshot all ofthe Tweets and any interaction you got in response.
How to turn this portion in: Submit the screenshot and a 2-3 paragraph response about the experience – your thoughts, what you felt went well and what could have gone better, what live reporting with a smartphone adds to (or takes away from) the news experience. * I am including a few visual examples, attached below.
