***I use Turnitin plagiarism software in Canvas. If you see a little inbox that is yellow or red. Click on that box, and check that you aren’t using too many direct quotes or that you haven’t used too much information verbatim from a source without using your own words. Everything highlighted (with the except of your citations) is information taken from a source verbatim. Use no more than one or two short direct quotes.
Overview:
All three parts of this assignment go all together (not as three separate assignments).
The purpose of this assignment is to help you understand how news changes depending on the form. An investigative news article will have a different audience and voice than a tweet of the same news story on Twitter or social media, or a blog, or a short article in USA Today. The Wall Street Journal will have a totally different audience than the Oregonian. If you are an international student, feel free to write for one of your country’s papers.
Find a subject that interests you from our 2021-2022 news— The subject matter is up to you. It’s fine if it is something in the news around entertainment, or technology as well. Find something that you really are interested in. This makes writing all the more engaging.
This assignment must be in an objective point-of-view. While we are seeing the rise of subjective journalism, and first-person POV in journalism, I want you to strive for a completely objective voice. This will help you not only understand traditional journalism, but this is the type of writing you most likely will do in business, engineering, science etc…writing. In other words, don’t use “I” or “me” in your article.
***
Part 1—Go to Twitter.
www.twitter.com/explore
(Links to an external site.)
Go to Twitter, and search for any 2021 or 2022 news topic that is of interest to you. There are a lot of different news topics, and even within a topic, different stories and angles.
Screenshot one tweet that you want to use for this assignment. (Ex.COVID-19 and young adults. Note that the tweet is attached to a news article, but many tweets won’t necessarily be attached to an article). The topic you chose will be the topic of your entire assignment.
EX: see below
@picaronhealth. “Young People Don’t Get a Pass with Covid-19.” Twitter. 19 March, 2020.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-young-people-dont-get-a-pass-with-covid-19/
(Links to an external site.)
Part 2—Write an 800 word mini research paper on the topic of your source tweet. Do not go over 800 words.
Make sure your article has a headline (title) and a byline (your name) underneath the headline.
EX:
Global Impact on Fast Fashion
by Georgette Dashiell
You will need at least two (2) academic and/or medical and/or government sources from the list below. DO NOT use media sources like newspapers or websites.
Your sources must be academic, peer-reviewed articles, and/or medical, and/or government source (example: information from the CDC or World Health Org (WHO) would be acceptable if you were writing on COVID-19. Or NASA if doing something on the aerospace industry). You can use different sources (EX: one academic article and one medical or government article), or you can do two academic, or two government, or two medical etc…
You MUST cite ALL of your sources in either MLA or APA at the end of this section, including your tweet. Also, just putting the source URLs on your works cited page is unacceptable. You must cite your sources in full citation format.
You will also need to use in-text citations (author, date). You need to cite where you got your tweet from, and all of the sources you used to research your news article. This is what fact checkers do. Do not use more than one or two short direct quotes.
Please make sure you PROOFREAD your article before you turn it in. Make sure you capitalize words like Twitter, but not tweet.
Source titles like journals, websites, books, films etc…are in italics. EX: Journal of Internal Medicine. Subsections of sources like articles, chapters, episodes etc…are in quotation marks except in APA. In MLA, the article title reads like a headline: “Covid-19 and Young Adults”. In APA, it would read like a sentence: Covid-19 and young adults.
Use the objective 3rd person POV. Please refrain from using the first person (I and/or me) or using your own opinions.
Part 3—Illustrate the topic of your article.
Create a comic based off of your article that includes at least one piece of information from your research. (ex. If your comic is about COVID-19 and young adults, and your research shows that they are not immune and has a statistic about that, then perhaps that shows up in your comic in some way). Your comic is about the same topic as the source tweet and your article, but now you are using visual storytelling in the form of a comic to illustrate your reporting.
Your comic must be at least 2 panels long (can be vertical or side-by-side). It is totally okay if you can’t draw, stick figures are fine.
Here is an examples from Patrick Chappette, who is a journalist for the New York Times (this is a six panel comic)