What can you do to make comm 208 better?

1. Talk more about the Html style.

2. Go into the stylebook a little more so you can get a better idea when you edit the newspaper.

3. Other than that I really enjoyed this semester and have a better understanding about modern news editing.

I'm really not too sure what can be done to make this course more applicable to other Comm courses. While this is one of the more important aspects of the Communications program (learning to edit is not only vital to edit others, but yourself as well), the only thing that I can think of is perhaps having more exercises, perhaps ones that give the feel of real-world journalism.

i know personaly, it would be better to have class more than just one day a week. I think it is hard to sit in one class for so long and after awhile it just gets boring and hard to think about everything thats being ask, or talked about. I like the blog idea, but sometimes its hard to remember to log on to it, since we dont have an assignment on it every week. If we knew there was an assignment due on it everyweek, it would be easier to remember. Other than that i like the way the class has been, its a very stress free class with not a lot of homework other than the blogs, and i like that. Even when we are in class there arent a lot of assignments and its a lot of class participation. i am looking foward to taking another class like this next semester!

Let the students have like 15 min at the beginnig of class to respond to any posts from previous classes. Even thought the internet is very popular, not everyone has access to it. I think you should make this worth credit every class. This will get our minds thinking about communications and you will know exactly who made it to class.

Doc,
Before I give you my suggestions on improving COMM 207, I want to congratulate you on a very succesful first run!!! I think you did an amazing job teaching this class for the first time. I feel like you spent a little bit of time on each chapter of the book which was very helpful in helping us understand the main points. In the future, I think it would be helpful to spend a little bit more time on editing actual articles. As tedious as it is, it really is very helpful, and it helped me in all of my other communications courses. The ACT of editing helps in every other aspect of communications because you can use the techniques and regulations in correspondence to broadcasting as well. All in all, great job Doc!!!

Doc, I posted this a second time as my own for your convenience, but I posted it as a comment to your "Tuesday's assignment" blog yesterday, so hopefully you won't count me as late. Thanks!!!

"SHG crowned again"

This story discusses SHG's big win Saturday night at Memorial Stadium in Champaign. Saturday night's victory was the second consecutive state championship for the SGH cyclones. Senior and wide receiver Dave Kavish's mother expresses her bittersweet feelings about the win, explaining that she was happy to see them win state again, but that it was sad to see her son play his last game as a cylcone.

Kavish also talks about how David and longtime friend, Bobby Brenneisan, spent much of their childhood dreaming about winning a state championship. They were waterboys for the 1995 game where SGH placed second. Kavish says that through the years, her son and his teammates realized that they had to be a team and play like one in order to win. The boys were definitely successful, as they won the state championship for the second year in a row, finishing their season undefeated.

# posted by Terah : 12:43 PM
11-27-06

This story was interesting. This is the direction our youth are headed in.

I found this story Police say mother microwaved her baby to be well written. I think that the title will catch anyones attention, and that just when reading the story you would want this mother put away for life, for even thinking about putting her own baby in the microwave. The writer doesn't go into great detail about the story, but the facts may not be available since she was just arrested for this.It also talks about another women who was jailed for the same thing in another state. I think the facts are there and this is a well written story.

In the story found here, scientists now believe that King Tutankhamun may have died from a sporting injury.

But precision scans of the king's left thigh revealed extensive details of a high-impact fracture above the left knee. The kneecap was badly twisted to the outside of the leg, and the wound was open to the outside world, where it was vulnerable to infection. What is believed to be the remnants of embalming fluid had deeply penetrated the fracture, suggesting the injury was sustained in the king's lifetime and not inflicted during the original excavation.

Paleoanthropologist Frank Ruhli believes that the fracture of a major bone may have led to a rupture of a major blood vessel. That, along with the fact that the boy king became infected due to his open-air wound, the possibility of a riding accident becoming plausible.

I'm getting moved into my new office now, so I'm cross-posting directions to my class blogs and the Message Board linked to my faculty page.

I'm in Beata Hall (the old Ursuline convent) across Eastman Street from St. Joe's parish and school. Either Room 31, if you go by the list of room assignments I've been given, or Room 8, if you go by the numbers on the doors. I've also attached my business card to the door.

To get there from Dawson, go out the south entrance and take the walk past Ursuline Academy. You'll go between the buildings, with the old building on the right and the gym on the left. Keep going through the parking lot, and there'll be a porch on the right (women's housing is straight ahead). On the south end of that porch, there's a door with a Christmas decoration. Go in the door, take the stairs just to the left and you'll be on the floor with faculty offices. They're in the hallway to the left at the top of the stairs. It takes a little less time to walk it than it does to give the directions!

Computer and phone are now hooked up ... you can reach me, as before, by phone at 525-1420 ext. 519 and by email at pellertsen@sci.edu. Email is usually better, but the voice mail in my office is working again.

What I like about this article is that Lovie Smith and the rest of the players in the Bears locker room stand behind their quarterback Rex Grossman. It shows that the players and the coaching staff stand firmly behind their decision on stay with Grossman through thick and thin.

"Five games into the year, everybody was talking about him as the MVP of the league," Kreutz said. After the first five games were over with Grossman had six straight outings that he hasn’t performed up to his potential.chicagotribune.

This article showed the side of the coaching staff and the players on the Bears organization and the only thing that The Associated Press who ever might that be wants everyone to believe that there might be a problem with the Bears quarterback Rex Grossman. Towards the end of the interview its sounds like that he is totally against Coach Lovie Smith’s decision on staying with his number one quarterback Rex Grossman.

Another British story. (The Brits write well.) Cross-posted to The Mackerel Wrapper since it's about mass communications.

Here's kind of a breathless, "gee-whiz" story about the latest round of innovations on the World Wide Web, that also gives a nice profile of Silicon Valley. It was in today's London Observer, the Sunday paper affiliated with The Guardian. I'll just post the lede, the nut graf(s) and an interesting observation or two that came further down in the story, by David Smith of The Observer.

The lede sets the scene:

The people spilling out of Ritual Coffee Roasters on to the San Francisco sidewalk scent more than coffee beans. Inside there are twenty and thirtysomethings, most of them male, working intently at laptops and harnessing the power of the internet. They are not merely logging on to look at MySpace or YouTube or The Next Big Thing. They plan to be The Next Big Thing.

It's boom time again in Silicon Valley and there is opportunity around every corner. Each month $180m (£94m) is invested in technology companies aspiring to change the lives of every person on the planet. A combination of youth, entrepreneurial spirit, technical insight, financial muscle and the American Dream, flavoured with West Coast utopianism, has formed a perpetual motion machine that is driving the information age. The brilliant brains of students and geeks, businessmen and scientists, angel investors and venture capitalists are feeding and thriving off each other, sparking the kind of electricity one imagines filled the air of northern England during the Industrial Revolution. A whole new world wide web is on the horizon.

'If you like the idea of going to a coffee shop and everyone works in software and in the conversation next to you someone is starting a company, this is the place to be,' said John Merrells, 37, who emigrated from Harrogate in North Yorkshire and runs a mobile phone software company here. 'Everyone you bump into is potentially something. The physical concentration of people is phenomenal. Like in the City of London, the continual rubbing up of people is how ideas come about.'

To British readers, the references to Yorkshire wouldn't sound "ye olde English-y," of course. They'd be no more exotic than Decatur or Bloomington.

Did you spot the nut graf, by the way? It's that second graf, that begins "It's boom time again in Silicon Valley ..."

A lot of the story is just a catalog of new ideas. Some, no doubt, will pan out. Others, I am sure, won't. And I wish I could say it held my interest better. But interspersed with the new product reviews are some good insights. Here's one on user-generated content like we see on YouTube or Flickr:

The idea of the moment, over-hyped perhaps, is Web 2.0. Before it, according to the definition, the web was a 'lean back' experience like television, in which official content providers' websites would be passively consumed by the rest of us. No one quite agrees on the meaning of Web 2.0, but everyone thinks it has something to do with social networks and content generated by users - a 'lean forward' experience in which consumers become creators. There are more than 1,000 such sites with prime examples including Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia written by users; Flickr, a photo sharing site; Facebook, which enables social networking; and Digg, in which the community selects and prioritises news stories like an editor.

Web 2.0's unprecedented army of contributors is capable of providing more detailed information about your special interest or geographical location than any traditional organisation could dream of. The race is now on to turn it into a commercial proposition.

Which leads into one of the clearest explanations I've seen of how they're changing things: "Each of these sites, and their many imitators, is taking something as old as human civilisation - word of mouth - and formalising it in a single space, giving consumers once unimaginable access to the recommendations of friends and the 'wisdom of crowds'."

There's also a very clear explanation -- again, the clearest I've seen -- of the "semantic web," and how it's expected to work. But I'll let you read that.

Repeating the assignment I made in class the night before the Thanksgiving holiday. It's due Tuesday.

1. Find a well-written news or news feature story. Link it to the blog.

2. Discuss the story. Tell what you like about it. Analyze the way it's written.

3. Post your analysis, with the link, to the blog.

Your grade on this assignment will depend on the quality of the story and the depth of your analysis, i.e. the amount of detail you go into. You may choose a hard news story (a wreck, a fire, a ball game, a government meeting, a murder investigation, etc.) or a feature (a profile of a person, human interest, background on a ball team or a political contest, one of the Thanksgiving stories we've been seeing this week, anything that isn't hard news in other words). To get maximum credit, post it to the blog before Tuesday's class.

Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I am posting examples of well-written news stories. They are intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value, quality of writing and any editorial changes you might want to make. I have been posting these stories since Thursday.

Read them over, because you've been assigned to find a story over the Thanksgiving holday, post it to the blog, link it and comment on it. Reading my posts will show you how to do yours.

A Thanksgiving special for you -- two Associated Press stories with a holiday theme. The first moved on the AP wire a couple of days before the holiday, and the second was in The Anchorage Daily News today.

In California, AP correspondent Ana Beatriz Cholo put a fresh lede on a fairly standard Thanksgiving story on how teachers handle the traditional story of Pilgrims and Indians joining in what sometimes we call the "first Thanksgiving" in 1621. Basically, she picks up on a teacher's imaginative way of getting it across to his third-graders, and leads with it.

Cholo's lede:

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."

By telling the story the way she does, without explaining why Morgan snatches up the kids' belongings, Cholo lets us as readers experience it the way they did.

It's pretty effective. But the history of U.S. relations with Native Americans is controversial, and Cholo balances it with a statement from another side:

Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.

"I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."

Notice that Cholo does not comment on this statement. Instead, she allows readers to decide for themselves whether Morgan is teaching hatred. Cholo goes on to quote other people whose views mirror the often subtle complexity of the issue.

Even American Indians are divided on how to approach a holiday that some believe symbolizes the start of a hostile takeover of their lands.

Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.

"If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive," he said. "They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving - that is what was originally intended."

Adam McMullin, a member of the Seminole tribe of Oklahoma and a spokesman for the National Congress of American Indians, said schoolchildren should get an accurate historical account.

"You can't just throw an Indian costume on a child," he said. "That stuff is not taken lightly. That's where educators need to be very careful."

And this:

Laverne Villalobos, a member of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska who now lives in the coastal town of Pacifica near San Francisco, considers Thanksgiving a day of mourning.

She went before the school board last week and asked for a ban on Thanksgiving re-enactments and students dressing up as Indians. She also complained about November's lunch menu that pictured a caricature of an Indian boy.

The mother of four said the traditional Thanksgiving celebrations in schools instill "a false sense of what really happened before and after the feast. It wasn't all warm and fuzzy."

After she complained, it was decided that pupils at her children's school will not wear Indian costumes this year.

Cholo ends her story with a quote from a historian and gets back to Morgan, the third-grade teacher in Long Beach:

James Loewen, a former history professor at the University of Vermont and author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong," said that during the first Thanksgiving, the Wampanoag Indians and the pilgrims had been living in relative peace, even though the tribe suspected the settlers of robbing Indian graves to steal food buried with the dead.

"Relations were strained, but yet the holiday worked. Folks got along. After that, bad things happened," Loewen said, referring to the bloody warfare that broke out later during the 17th century.

Morgan, a teacher for more than 35 years, said that after conducting his own research, he changed his approach to teaching about Thanksgiving. He tells teachers at his school this is a good way to nurture critical thinking, but he acknowledged not all are receptive: "It's kind of an uphill struggle."

So in the end, Cholo's story is balanced. That's important. But what sets it apart from the others is a creative lede that draws readers in and helps us feel what the kids in Morgan's class -- and some American Indians -- feel about the first Thanksgiving.

The other story is also about Indians. More accurately, it's about Alaska Natives and what some of them eat for Thanksgiving. It was in today's Anchorage Daily News, and I suspect it's just as much a holiday staple as turkey and cranberry sauce ... or "Eskimo ice cream" made of seal fat and blueberries, as the case may be. The story, by AP staff writer Rachel D'Oro, begins with a good narrative lede:

David Smith was newly arrived to the North Slope village of Nuiqsut when the former upstate New Yorker cooked up a couple of turkeys and vat of chili for the Eskimo community's annual Thanksgiving dinner.

He was completely unprepared for another dish on the menu last year: hundreds of pounds of gleaming red whale meat.

"I thought we were going to have a feast. I never assumed it would be a feast of whale meat," said Smith, 76, the village's city administrator who is originally from Fillmore, N.Y. With four bowhead whales landed this year, he can only imagine what today has in store for people gathering at the village school.

"It's going to be a huge celebration," he said.

It takes D'Oro right into her nut graf -- which, like so many, is actually a couple of grafs long:

The same could be said for other Thanksgiving festivities planned in Alaska Native villages around the state. For many the holiday is a welcome boost in the dark, frozen season, which has plunged Nuiqsut to lows of 25 degrees below zero.

Tables at public and private dinners alike will be set with store-bought turkey and all the trimmings alongside delicacies made from subsistence foods, like caribou stew, moose roast and seal oil. For dessert, there might be frybread or akutaq, whipped fat mixed with sugar and berries and sometimes greens or fish. Even in urban areas, Natives might gather in groups to observe the holiday with Western and Native fare.

The rest of the story hangs nicely off that lede. It consists of brief descriptions of what people are eating today in different American Indian and Eskimo villages across Alaska. Some tell a lot about traditional subsistence patterns and Native cultures:

In Nuiqsut each bowhead caught is divided into thirds, to be distributed at Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations, as well as a traditional blanket toss in June. Each event gives residents and visitors a chance to sample the bowhead, a species that can measure 50 feet or more and weigh up to 100 tons. Edible parts include the meat, tongue and muktuk, the blubber and skin.

Whaling crews and other residents of the Inupiat Eskimo community have spent weeks cutting up portions for the Thanksgiving feast, the first round in the whale-sharing cycle. As with the other events, it is a time to reflect on the bounty brought by the bowhead to the community of 400, said Lampe, 39, who has lived in the village most of his life.

"It's about respecting nature," he said. "It's reminding people and crews that we live in a unique land and for a creature this size to give itself to the community is a real honor."

Some effective, although admittedly unexciting, photojournalism accompanies the ADN's story. At an Alaska Native dinner in Anchorage, AP photographer Al Grillo shot pictures featuring people loading their plates with whale blubber and caribou alongside the turkey and mashed potatoes. The pictures do tell a story.

Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I will be posting example of well-written news stories. This is intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value, quality of writing and any editorial changes you might want to make. I have been posting these stories since Thursday.

Read them over, because you'll also be asked to choose a story over the Thanksgiving holday, post it to the blog, link it and comment on it. Reading my posts will show you how to do yours.

Now here's a headline that just sort of grabs you and wraps itself around you ...

I spotted it earlier tonight on the BBC News website. At the top of its list of the "most e-mailed" stories were:

Snake bursts after gobbling gator
Murdoch cancels OJ Simpson plans
Uganda Aids education 'working'
Borat holds on at US box office
Microsoft eyes Office switch test

There's no way I could pass up that first headline. So I clicked on it, and got the following story. Turns out it was old news, an Associated Press story dated Oct. 5 out of Florida. The Beeb gave it a throwaway lede:

An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.
The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park.

The rangers say the find suggests that non-native Burmese pythons might even challenge alligators' leading position in the food chain in the swamps.

The python's remains with the victim's tail protruding from its burst midsection were found last week. The head of the python was missing.

The importance, or news value, of the story (such as it is) would be that the Burmese python is an invasive species in Florida. But I doubt that's why readers of the BBC website were so taken with it.

The story is just odd, bizzare.

If you get a story like that, there's no way you can liven it up with fancy writing. You don't have to. And you couldn't if you tried. Instead, you just play it straight.

And that's what the Beeb did.

Besides, with a headline like that, what else do you have to do?

Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I will be posting example of well-written news stories. This is intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value, quality of writing and any editorial changes you might want to make. I have been posting these stories since Thursday.

Read them over, because you'll also be asked to choose a story over the Thanksgiving holday, post it to the blog, link it and comment on it. Reading my posts will show you how to do yours.

Yesterday I confessed I used to write an "inside baseball" political gossip column. Today I went looking for a sports story to post to the blog. Instead, I found a political gossip column that reads kind of like a sports page column.

That figures.

When I covered politics, I was advised to cover the politicians like they belonged on the sports pages. (Sometimes, believe me, they did.) Good advice, as it turned out. Not all games are like Bobby Thompson's home run, and not all political events are like the "stolen election" of 2000. Most of the time, you're writing up prep league scores or meetings of the county board of zoning appeals. So what do you do to make your story stand out? Especially if you're writing a feature? You focus on the people, you tell what it's like to be there.

That's what I like about this routine political color story in today's New York Times. It's by Carl Hulse of the Times' Washington bureau, and it's about the upcoming change from Republican to Democratic control in the U.S. House and Senate. A real prep league yawner of a story, but watch how Hulse uses quotes and description to set the scene:

Some Republicans were quick to remind Democratic colleagues that they had not been all bad. “Bill, be nice to me,” Representative Peter T. King of New York, the departing chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, shouted to Representative Bill Pascrell Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, a member of the panel. “I was always nice to you.”

The power shift was evident in ways large and small. For years, reporters have crowded the Republican end of the speaker’s lobby off the House floor, buttonholing majority lawmakers who ran the place, and virtually ignoring the opposite end, where somewhat irrelevant Democrats came and went with little notice. As soon as lawmakers returned Monday, the news tide flowed to the Democratic end as journalists swarmed for insights about the party’s infighting for majority leader.

“Wow,” said one longtime Congressional doorkeeper. “I thought that wouldn’t have happened until at least January.” That is when Democrats officially take power.

Notice also that the doorkeeper was savvy enough not to give his name to Hulse. Or Hulse was savvy enough to not even ask it. Or both were savvy.

What draws readers into a story, whether it's about high school sports or backroom politics, is people. Good writers write about people, and good editors look for good writing about people.

Here's how Hulse writes about two GOP senators who contested the same leadership post -- the party whip, who helps round up votes for the minority leader -- and how the winner was gracious in victory. Since he'd been writing about Democrats, Hulse begins the passage with a transition:

But Democrats were not the only winners. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, who lost his Republican leadership job in 2002 after a racially charged remark and has been plotting his return ever since, won the No. 2 spot in the minority. He will serve as whip under the new Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

Usually willing to share his opinions freely, Mr. Lott was uncharacteristically quiet after defeating Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee by one vote for the job.

Mr. Lott seemed determined not to take the limelight away from Mr. McConnell on the day of the elections even though it was obvious that Mr. Lott’s return would grab the headlines, given that Mr. McConnell was unopposed.

As the week wore on, however, it became harder for Mr. Lott to restrain himself. “I can still count votes,” beamed Mr. Lott, whose skill in that department is legendary.

Hulse not only writes about politics as if he were writing about sports. He writes about politicians talking about politics as if it were sports:

Oddly enough, the closed-door nominations of Mr. Lott and Mr. Alexander, two Southerners, featured dueling hockey analogies.

In urging a vote for Mr. Alexander, Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia compared the Tennessee senator’s political radar to that of Wayne Gretzky, the hockey great who knew where the puck was going to be before it got there.

Not to be outdone, Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who told his colleagues he knew a thing or two about hockey, compared Mr. Lott to Bobby Orr, who he said knew where the puck was going before it went.

That, apparently, was enough to put Mr. Lott’s election on ice.

And he knocks the puck into the goal with a real groaner of a pun. What's not to like about this routine inside political baseball story?

Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I will be posting example of well-written news stories. This is intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value, quality of writing and any editorial changes you might want to make. I have been posting these stories since Thursday.

Here's one from Mark Sandalow, the San Francisco Chronicle's Washington bureau chief. In a weblog called PoliticsBLOG on today's SFGate website, he had an item on U.S. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi's role in an internal leadership fight for the No. 2 spot in the House Democratic caucus.

Sandalow writes an "inside baseball" political column ... stuff that nobody but a political junkie would bother to read ... but he does a good job of it. (I can talk because I used to write a political gossip column myself, for a paper in a Midwestern state capital city which will go unnamed here.) It's even-handed, and it gives a sense of what it's like behind the scenes in a legislative caucus.

(Vocabulary time: A caucus is a private meeting of the legislators of one political party, like the House Democrats or the Senate Republicans. We have them in Springfield, too.)

Back to Sandalow's column. He uses a lot of anonymous sources here, but he has to. The caucus meeting was private, and he's writing for Pelosi's hometown paper. Anybody quoted in this story could get in hot water with Madame Speaker. OK, Mme. Speaker-elect, technically speaking.

Sandalow begins in the middle, with an off-the-record interview he conducted with one House Democrat while the others were speaking to the TV cameras. Notice how quickly he sets the scene and sums up his column at the beginning:

As members of Congress huddled around cameras and microphones to assure news reporters that Democrats would quickly move on from today's leadership fight, privately they raised questions about their speaker-to-be's judgment.

"I have no idea what she was thinking,'' one veteran member of Congress and strong Pelosi supporter said just out of earshot of the television cameras, which jammed the hallway outside the Cannon Caucus Room where Democrats had just overwhelmingly endorsed Steny Hoyer to be their new majority leader over Pelosi's objections.

"This was a lose-lose scenario for her,'' the lawmaker said.

Here's the background, which any political junkie reading Sandalow's blog would know. Rep. Hoyer, D-Md., had just won the No. 2 spot, called the majority leader, even though Pelosi had endorsed Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa. The vote was 149-86, so Pelosi lost big.

Sandalow talked to half dozen members, all but one of whom went off the record. One of them suggested why he didn't want to be quoted by name. And all of them spoke more freely knowing their names wouldn't be used -- especially second-guessing their leader. That's just the way political reπorting is done. Sandalow says:

Loyalty to Murtha, a concern that Hoyer had not been loyal enough, and Pelosi's interest in promoting Murtha's get-out-of-Iraq ideas were the most charitible motives offered.

Insecurity,paranoia, and vindictiveness were among the negative ones.

"Everyone has their own leadership style. It's not how I would have handled it,'' said another long time member of Congress, who refused to be identified, particularly to a writer from Pelosi's home town newspaper.

Sandalow puts in in perspective, though, when he suggests "[n]o one suggested the Pelosi's reign as speaker was in danger or that she wasn't capable of fully recovering," and he adds, "Even some Pelosi critics shrugged their shoulders and suggested that having just won a Democatic majority, perhaps there was a method to her madness." He also adds some perspective when he suggests the national press, which has been playing up the leadership in-fighting in the Democratic caucus, is more than a little bit hyped:

Members differed in their analysis of how difficult it would be to patch up the scars from today's battle, but they agreed that the news media had far overstated its consequences.

"Pelosi Splits Democrats With Push For Murtha,'' blared the banner headline of this morning's Washington Post, with a subhead: Speaker-to-Be Accused of Strong Arm Tactics.''

The story went on to chronicle how Pelosi had talked to some members about committee assignments in the same conversation as the Murtha-Hoyer vote, which hardly seems a strong arm tactic in a town where two members of the current congress are in prison for accepting bribes, and another is explaining how $90,000 in bribe money ended up in his freezer.

"This was more a monster of the media than a reality within the caucus,'' said Rep. Mike Thompson, D-Napa, a close Pelosi ally who was perfectly willing to talk on the record.

So, in the end, Sandalow's column gives a sense of perspective on what is probably going to turn out to be a run-of-the-mill political story in spite of the headlines it got in this week's papers. And it does give a sense of what it's like to be in Washington these days, and what it's like to cover legislative politics. Not bad for a run-of-the-mill political gossip column item.

Between now and our final exam Tuesday, Dec. 5, I will be posting example of well-written news stories. This is intended to help you sharpen your editorial eye for what's good, what's not, what needs to be changed and what doesn't. It is also intended to help you do better on the final, since I will ask you to evaluate a story for news value and quality of writing.

Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez isn't as famous as the "talking heads" you see yelling about politics on cable television. But he's one of the best reporters in the business. He's been at the LA Times since 2001, and before that he was an editor-at-large for Time magazine and a correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer in Iraq, Bosnia, Colombia and the Soviet Union. Here's a recent column on a halfway house for homeless people with mental health issues. He tells its story through that of one of the residents, and he does it with complete respect to the man's dignity.

Lopez has a gift for quoting people, and letting them describe themselves in their own words. In this column, notice how he captures the homeless man's way of speaking even when the words aren't in quotation marks. He takes his time about getting into the story and, typically, he lets his subject characterize himself in his own words. Lopez' Nov. 1 column began like this:

Alexander Riddick, a bearded 55-year-old in a Steelers cap and purple sports coat, says he isn't going to lie to me. He loved that wife of his, Ethel Mae, but they had an agreement. He was eager to hit the road every now and then over the course of 30-plus years, and conveniently enough, she never seemed to mind getting him out of the house.

Riddick would bum his way to Vegas, or bus home to Virginia, usually up to no good as he drifted. Each time, once he'd gotten over the scent of another woman's perfume, he'd come around to how much he needed the woman he didn't deserve.

Back he'd crawl, scratching at the door, and she'd let him in.

Even with all that forgiveness, Riddick didn't have any idea how much he loved his wife until two years ago, when a massive heart attack took her quickly, sweeping in like an unexpected gust.

"I woke up and realized I was alone," Riddick says of those first days without her. "And you know what? She had said, 'Danny' — she called me by my nickname — 'you gonna miss me when I'm gone.' "

Riddick was living with her in Covina when she died, but her name was on the lease, not his. And he was a bad risk, with no steady job and a rap sheet that included a few trips up the river on drug convictions.

So he knocked on the doors of relatives in Los Angeles, rattled around a bit and ended up falling apart on skid row in downtown Los Angeles. Riddick got into fights, stayed up all night to keep from being robbed, got locked up for unpaid jaywalking tickets, blacked out a couple of times and was rushed to the hospital once by paramedics.

Skid row is full of stories like his, troubled souls who never quite pull themselves together, despite the huge cost to taxpayers for everything from police patrols to prison cells. But Riddick caught a break when he stopped by Lamp, which treats people with chronic mental illness.

Notice how we learn enough about Riddick's story to care about him, just a little, before we get into the part about his police record. And notice how Lopez' language changes? He's more factual, less conversational when he gets to that part.

Lopez' language gets more factual as he switches from Riddick to the director of the Lamp center that took him in. The story continues:

Stuart Robinson, a Lamp director, says Riddick was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition with characteristics of schizophrenia and a mood disorder. Robinson said it's likely Riddick has had the condition for many years without knowing it.

When Riddick wasn't at Lamp, he shined shoes outside downtown restaurants and hotels, blew the money on rock cocaine and swore he could hear dead relatives telling him what a failure he was. He slept on sidewalks but kept returning to Lamp, where Robinson, who has a gift for connecting with everyone who walks in the door, knew he was looking at a man he could help.

"He's a prime example," Robinson said, of someone who could benefit from what's known as permanent supportive housing. That's a setup in which all the services a client might need — drug rehab, mental health services, job counseling, life-management workshops — are just down the hall from his apartment.

The rest of the story focuses on Riddick's life at a new halfway house called Rainbow, his struggle to stay clean and sober, the small steps he takes to get his life under control again and the support he gets at the halfway house. Lopez takes us with him as he interviews Riddick:

On Tuesday morning, I visited his new digs. Rainbow Apartments is an 89-room, hotel-like building with a sleek, minimalist design. He checked me in at the counter, pushed the elevator button and escorted me up to his apartment.

"This is home," he said proudly.

It's a nice, clean space, with a 12-step book next to his bed and two pairs of shoes on the floor under a window. Not much of a view, he says, but that's OK.

"I need to stay focused."

To show me he means business, he went over to his nightstand and pulled out a daily calendar. Written in for Saturday at 12:30 p.m. is a shoeshine job in Little Tokyo, where he met a woman with nice boots and offered to shine them like new. Come by every Saturday, she told him.

On Sunday at 9 p.m., he's got a shoeshine appointment with the security guard who works at Pete's Cafe and Bar at 4th and Main streets.

That calendar is going to be filled, Riddick said, with shoeshine jobs and the times of all his appointments for rehab and counseling. For today, he wrote in a reminder to pay the rent with his disability check.

"I got to organize my life."

What I like about this is that Lopez doesn't say Riddick is working hard to succeed at a menial job, he shows us Riddick working hard at a menial job. And his description of the job is very matter-of-fact, the same tone he'd use with a stockbroker or a four-star general.

Lopez' column, called "Points West," allows him to express an opinion. Sometime he does, sometimes he doesn't. In the Nov. 1 column, he does. But it doesn't come till the end of the column, when he mentions a grand opening -- and media pop -- at Rainbow. Lopez says:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others will be there to rally support for state Proposition 1C and Los Angeles Measure H, the affordable-housing bonds that would fund, among other things, projects like Rainbow Apartments.

Measure H would only cost the average homeowner about $50 a year, but the developers who pitched the idea to the mayor and City Council have not come up with enough money to wage an effective campaign. The mayor should get even by implementing a housing policy that requires developers to include affordable housing in their projects.

If you'd like to learn more about Measure H or Proposition 1C, which are on the ballot because working people can't afford to buy houses in California's still-crazy market, go to SmartVoter.org for all the details.

But keep in mind, Alvidrez advises, that the housing bonds will create hundreds of construction jobs, and that with Measure H, $50 a year is a bargain compared with the price of the cops, paramedics, emergency room staffs, court and prison employees who now figure into the cost of churning a sick, homeless person through the system and kicking him out the other side without addressing any of his problems.

And that's the point of the column, which ran just before this month's election: Support the referendum to build more of these halfway houses.

But Lopez doesn't leave it at that. At the very end of the column, he shifts the focus back to Reddick and the new life he's building at his halfway house:

As we sat together in his room, Riddick told me he had a nightmare on his first night in the new place.

"I dreamed that demons were coming at me. Everybody was trying to get me. I asked myself how they got in here and then I realized I let them in."

He didn't need an analyst to explain the meaning. He's got to stay clean and choose his friends wisely. After that, he said, his first goal is to reunite with his son and daughter. He had to pause before continuing, holding his head in his hands.

"I ain't seen them since I buried their mother," he said.

I asked how long he expected to be at Rainbow.

"I'll be here till I get something better," he said, telling me he wants to get a license for his shoeshine business and maybe go full-time at one of the downtown hotels.

And then where?

He took his hat off and leaned in close.

"I won't be goin' backwards."

The column isn't only a sensitive piece of reporting. It's an effective argument for funding the homeless shelters.

Here's a direct link to that "Understanding Defamation" website we covered in class Tuesday night. It's put up by Dorothy Bowles, a professor in the College of Communications at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville who has lots of useful links for communications students on her faculty website. I'd recommend it even if I weren't a product of the communications college at UTK. Among other things, you'll learn why it's not libelous to call UTK football fans a bunch of racist rednecks -- and it's not why you think it is!

Here's the nice thing about studying communications: The stuff in the textbooks is matched by what goes on in the real world. Take this story, for example. It's about a libel suit in Kane County Circuit Court, in the far western suburbs of Chicago, and it appeared in today's Chicago Trib. It's a perfect example of how libel suits play out.

An update: This afternoon (Tue.), long after the Trib went to press, the jury returned a verdict. The columnist who was the defendant in the case was guilty of libel, and the judge who was the plaintiff was awared $7 million in damages.

Here's the nut graf(s) in this morning's Trib:

There is no question that the words former Kane County Chronicle columnist Bill Page wrote in two columns in 2003 accusing Chief Justice Robert Thomas of injecting politics into a case pending before the high court were defamatory. The defense conceded as much.

Jurors, who got the case around 4 p.m., began considering whether Page and the Kane County Chronicle knew the columns were false or showed a reckless disregard for the truth and, if so, whether Thomas, 54, a former Chicago Bears placekicker, suffered personally and professionally as a result.

See how it works? To be found guilty of libel, it has to be shown you acted unlawfully and the plaintiff suffered damage that a jury can put a cash value on.

Here's how lawyers for the two argued the issues at stake. Note how Thomas' lawyer focuses on money issues:

In closing arguments, attorney Joseph Power said Page made up allegations that Thomas threatened to severely punish, and possibly disbar, the former Kane County state's attorney in a disciplinary case unless local Republican leaders agreed to support his nominee for a local judgeship in an upcoming election. Power noted that neither Page nor the Kane County Chronicle produced witnesses that could testify that Thomas made such a threat.

Power said the columns hurt Thomas' reputation and could hurt his ability to get a high-paying job with a prestigious law firm when his Supreme Court term is up in eight years.

"The allegations go to the heart of what a judge is, and that's integrity," Power told jurors.

He asked that Thomas be awarded as much as $17.4 million in damages: $7.7 million in lost potential income, another $7.7 million for damage to his reputation, and up to $2 million compensation for the public humiliation he argued Thomas has suffered.

Defense attorney Stephen Rosenfeld argued the jury's decision could have ramifications far beyond the dispute between Thomas and the newspaper. Rosenfeld told jurors they were being asked to rein in 1st Amendment freedoms that founding fathers granted to newspapers and to the press.

In the end, the jury agreed with the plaintiff. It may come as a disappointment to political columnists and other guardians of First Amendment liberties but it shouldn't come as a surprise ... especially to courthouse reporters and others who are familiar with the courts. Defamation law, at bottom, is about protecting people's ability to make money.

Clinton, Spitzer Win Easily in New York

In the Senate, Clinton has been praised as a hardworking and effective advocate for the state who's been willing to forge relationships across party lines. She's irked many anti-war activists for refusing to recant her 2002 vote authorizing military intervention in Iraq, but in recent months has harshly criticized the Bush administration's war strategy and called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

Spitzer, a popular state attorney general nicknamed "the Sheriff of Wall Street" for his high-profile investigations of corporate corruption, crushed his GOP opponent, lobbyist and former assemblyman John Faso. Spitzer, with his campaign slogan "Day One Everything Changes," has vowed to bring his zeal for reform to the famously dysfunctional state government.

Spitzer, who succeeds Republican Gov. George Pataki, has pledged to reduce property taxes in the state, which are among the highest in the nation, and bring the state's spiraling Medicaid costs under control. He must also resolve a lawsuit requiring the state to spend $4 billion to $5 billion more on New York City schools.

wasingtonpost.

In the Senate, Clinton has been praised as a hardworking and effective advocate for the state who's been willing to forge relationships across party lines. She's irked many anti-war activists for refusing to recant her 2002 vote authorizing military intervention in Iraq, but in recent months has harshly criticized the Bush administration's war strategy and called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

Spitzer, a popular state attorney general nicknamed "the Sheriff of Wall Street" for his high-profile investigations of corporate corruption, crushed his GOP opponent, lobbyist and former assemblyman John Faso. Spitzer, with his campaign slogan "Day One Everything Changes," has vowed to bring his zeal for reform to the famously dysfunctional state government.

Spitzer, who succeeds Republican Gov. George Pataki, has pledged to reduce property taxes in the state, which are among the highest in the nation, and bring the state's spiraling Medicaid costs under control. He must also resolve a lawsuit requiring the state to spend $4 billion to $5 billion more on New York City schools.

wasingtonpost.

Here's a typical election-day story that was written with the "lede-to-come," (abbreviated LTC or, more commonly, LTK). It was filed to The Nashville Tennessean's website at 9 p.m. Tuesday, when the votes were still being counted. The headline and lede are based on latest, but still partial, returns:

Ford narrows gap in U.S. Senate race

Bob Corker's lead in the U.S. Senate race narrowed to being only three points ahead of his Democratic rival, Harold Ford Jr., with 27% of the state's voting precincts reporting.

Corker, a Republican, received 51% of the vote to Ford's 48%, according to a tally by the Associated Press. Corker has led the race by as many as 10 points in the AP tallies throughout the night. However, it's not known which precincts are reporting.

Corker, the former Chattanooga mayor, and his family watched the returns in the Chattanoogan hotel in downtown Chattanooga. Ford, who served for 10 years in the U.S. Congress, watched the returns from a room in the Peabody hotel in Memphis..

Then the story switches to the "A-matter," the part that was written earlier. (In this case, you can tell because they didn't edit out the full identification of the two candidates, as you normally would after the first reference. But The Tennessean is a good paper, and they had a lot to keep up with Tuesday night. So let's forgive them.) Here's the transition where the A-matter begins:

U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. wrapped up his race for the U.S. Senate at a diner draped with Confederate flags in Jackson, Tenn., while former Chattanooga Mayor Bob Corker did a campaign swing that ended at a church

The two men were facing off to replace Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., in one of the most closely-watched contests in the country.

Democrat Ford held himself out as an independent-minded candidate for change, while Republican Corker touted his "Tennessee life" as a businessman and past stints in public office.

The tight match-up drove heavy turnout throughout much of the state with hour-long waits in the rain at some polling places in Nashville today.

The race has drawn national attention as one that could tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate - and even more notice when a Republican commercial, featuring a bare-shouldered woman flirtatiously asking Ford to "call me," raised questions of race-baiting.

Until that commercial ran, Ford and Corker were tied in the pre-election public opinion polls. After it ran, Corker pulled ahead by several percentage points. It was considered racist because Ford is black, the actress shown in the ad was white and misegenation historically has been a deeply rooted issue in the state, especially in portions of West Tennessee adjacent to the Mississippi delta where within living memory a 14-year-old black youth was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

The website found here

provides some good information in terms of creating a web page. Here is a sample from PageTutor:

Let's get started. First, if you have any of them fancy HTML editors and have an inkling to break em in now... forget it. The worst way to learn is to use one of those things. (Although there are a few that you will find helpful, they'll only help you once you learn the basics, so don't even worry about it now.) What's the best way to learn HTML?? Notepad. I know, I know, you got this 9 megabyte Wunder Wizzard that says it's gonna make putting up a web page as easy as scratching your head. Just trust me on this one. K? K.

As you can see, this site really breaks down all of the information. It uses minimal jargon. And when it DOES need to use big words, it breaks them down and explains exactly what the term means.

What makes a good web page?

The Website Analyst website stresses the importance of website charactersitics and quality information when creating a good web page. Some important things to keep in mind when creating a web page are as follows: Usefulness of information
Ease of surfing on the site
Quick response time
Excellent product information flow
Readability and originality
Friendly layout
Good listings on major search engines

The Website Analyst suggests, "You should also pay close attention to your website's traffic analysis package, to measure the effectiveness of your online business. To maximize your success, develop a clear Internet strategy - the goals of your website. Your success criteria should also include the presentation elements, the right graphics format and the text."

W3C.

It's really easy to build your first Web page. There are only a few HTML tags you need to learn.

Here's How:
Write the html tag
Write the head of your document
Write your title Put your title here
Close the head of your document Open the body of your document
Give your page a heading heading goes here Write your page contents
Separate paragraphs with the p tag
Close the body of your page
Close the html
Tips:
Use any text editor to write your page.
Write your HTML tags in lowercase - this conforms to the current standard.
Review the page in your browser off your hard drive before uploading it to your server.
What You Need:
HTML editor -or-
Text editor
More How To's from your Guide To Web Design / HTML
Suggested Reading
Beginning HTML
Links to Learn HTML
HTML Tutorial Links
HTML Tag Library
Basic Tags for a Web Site.

W3C.

This is the perfect web site if you want to create your own page. It give you step-by-step instructions. So easy that a kid can create from this page. It shows you how to get started and gives you great ideas on how to keep a hot and exciting page.

When looking for a website on how to make a good website, i found one that i think has some very good information on it. The website i found was . There are 8 main points that are talked about and that need to me remembered when creating a web page. One of the things this site says to remember when making a web page

Content first. The most important thing for a web page is content, some sort of information, something (hopefully) new. Links to other web pages aren't really content (unless your collection of links is truly unique for some reason). Fancy graphics are not content, unless you made them yourself, in which case they are definitely your content and worth putting on the web.
Another way to state this is that when you start creating a home page, worry first about content, and last about font formats, cute graphics, and snazzy backgrounds. Content is far more valuable and interesting! Later you can go back and improve the visual appearance. (Which explains why some of my web pages are rather plain...)

At the bottom of this site, there are a few more websites that can be looked at for more help. One of them is a page, of bad websites. It has things that shouldn't be done. This site also has some useful information when creating a new website.

Reading assignment. In addition to the chapters on libel and privacy law in our textbook and the AP Stylebook, read the following webpage on intellectual property law and copyright as it applies to the internet. It is by Thomas G. Field, Jr., professor at the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concorn, N.H., and it is the best summary of the law on the subject I've seen.

Basically, as Field says, a "poem or picture is as much protected on a [computer] disk as on a piece of paper or canvas." It has the same protection when it is posted to a webpage. That means the basics you'll read about in our text and the Stylebook apply equally to the World Wide Web.

But there are some extra wrinkles on web publication, especially with email and listservs (online discussion forums), and newspaper journalism hasn't completely caught up with them. So you'll want to supplement your reading with Field's summary.

I'm cross-posting this item to both of my blogs for mass comm. students ...

You'll see why. It's a casebook example of how not to crop a photo -- why you've really got to think about what it's going to look like in print.

Follow this link to Daily Kos, then scroll down till you see this tag, "Update on a completely unrelated matter -- here's a lesson in how NOT to set up a photo shoot if your name is 'Charlie Bass'," followed by the picture.

I don't know who Charlie Bass is, or what he's running for. But I've got to be sympathetic!

Daily Kos, by the way, is a very partisan weblog for self-described progressive Democrats. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the blog administrator, is becoming a force in the party, and it's Here's what Wikipedia says about Zúniga, and the weblog.