Citizen Journalism: Empower Yourself, Empower Your Community

Journalism takes practice, and this introduction offers ways to get started writing and assignments that will put class lessons into practice. The four sessions will include:

• a brief history and introduction to journalism beginning with the penny press to our current multimedia, multiple platform landscape; identifying and surfacing story ideas and focusing stories; finding information and triangulating sources;
• five W's; basic story structures; hard and soft ledes; review of first story;
• interviewing strategies; features, investigative reporting, enterprise stories; review of second story;
• getting in print and on-line; op-ed, letter to the editor, blog post, community reporting; review of third story; plans for future.

We will use a class blog to publish and share stories generated during the class, and will explore other options for publishing participants' writing.