LEAD With the Right Foot

This week in PRCA 3330 I was instructed to work my way through Poynter News University’s LEAD Lab.  Needless to say, after my last experience with Poynter News I was not looking forward to jumping down the same “rabbit hole” again.

This week’s LEAD Lab focused on making your news leads the best they can be.  While the information found in the course my be educational to those student who have not taken Introduction to Journalism or News Reporting and Writing I found it to be redundant and a waste of my time (No offense Professor Nixon!).

For starters, I don’t like the layout of the Poynter’s site.  The setup of the pages and navigation buttons of the courses that I have taken thus far have been horrendously setup.  I am often confused about where I am supposed to click in the module and I find myself often having to go back several times with in the same course in search of interactive items I have missed. 

One Week of Twitter

Tweet!!! Tweet!!! Tweet!!! As a class in PRCA 3330 we were all required to tweet for one week. Each person was to send out as least 20 original tweets and respond to at least 5 classmates.

I set up a Twitter account seven weeks ago as part of my own personal social media experiment.  I don’t use Twitter everyday, however I am on it a least five days a week.

Initially, I had snubbed Twitter thinking to myself, ‘Who cares where you ate lunch?’  I figured the whole thing was just a fad and expected people to quickly get bored and move on to the next best thing.

Is It Worthy?

This week in PRCA 3330 I was asked to read a chapter which discussed the ins and outs of what makes something newsworthy.  I had never really thought about the subject.  What makes many us turn on the news every morning and watch sometimes for hours?

First of all, there are the obvious elements:

Timing- News should be ‘new.’

Significance- Does is affect a lot of people or only a handful?

Proximity- Geographic closeness and closeness to the subject mater.

Prominence- Well know people/events get more coverage.

Human Interest- Emotional appeals.

Why Didn’t I Think of This?

While watching the E-Trade, “Jealous Girlfriend,” commercial that aired during the 2010 Super Bowl I experienced one of those moments.

Entertainment talk shows like Access Hollywood an Entertainment Tonight are found on most channels in some form or another.  I usually bypass these shows and go for a more hardcore, “I know someone that has actually had that happen to them,” approach: Maury.

Poynter’s News University. Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More

This week in my public relations writing class I took part in an online learning class, Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More, on Poynter’s News University’s site.  A lot of my friends cringe when they hear the words “grammar” and “style,” but I was looking forward to taking the course because I’m always looking to improve my writing skills.

Social Media: “That’s not for me!”

At least that’s what I thought as recently as Jan. 11, 2010.

In the past 10 years, I have not really had the need for a Facebook page, Twitter account, or any other social media profile. I tend to keep in touch will my family and a small circle of friends by telephone.

I graduated high school in 2000, three years before MySpace came into existence, and the most that I had ever used the internet for was research. Now it seems like social media networking sites are everywhere.  The first thing that classmates ask me when they want to keep in touch is, “Do you have a Facebook?”  When I say no people usually take a step back and look at me as if I have three heads.

Blog Comments. So what? Who cares?

Many blogs contain a comment section which allows for interaction between the blog author and the readers…

But is the comment section essential to having a successful blog?  I decided to get the opinions of fellow bloggers to gain a better perspective.  While researching I stumbled across two interesting posts on blog comments.

In the first post, Are blog comments necessary for community?, Justin Hitt raised an interesting point in his post.  He said that allowing of comments on blog posts is mostly for the benefit of the writer and not the person commenting.

“Twenty-ten” or “Two thousand ten?” That is the question!

Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, recently tackled the issue in a post I just read: How Do You Pronounce 2010?

To be honest I haven’t given much thought to the question.  Still I can understand people’s confusion over the issue.

Fogarty asserts that before the turn of the century people generally pronounced the name of the year by coupling the first two numbers together and the last two numbers together shortening the pronunciation.  For example: the year 1920 would be said as “nineteen twenty.”