storme

I really am not too in tune with current events going on around the Duluth area, so I apologize for this posting being a little late. After using my minimal knowledge and a little research, I have come up with some issues that might work. The first issue which interested me is the lack of funding for the Duluth Police Department. The department has had to cut back on important programs such as D.A.R.E. for elementary school kids because of their lack of funds. This situation has also resulted in a shortage of personel. I do not know a lot about this issue, but I would like to find out more about why there is no extra money for such an important community program and what the money is being used for. The next issue is very cliche, and I have no intention of using it for my paper. However, because the assignment requires two, I must mention it. This topic is the ongoing budget cuts and downsizing of the Duluth school district. The schools continue to lose funding for programs and in turn the number of schools is decreasing exponentially. I am curious as to what can be done to stop this problem, and whether or not combining schools and classes results in a better educational experience. This would be an easy thing to argue about.

Chapter six deals with writing news stories, which is something that is very intersting to me seeing as I intend on being a Journalism major once I leave LSC. Much of the information covered in the chapter are things I have learned about before in a previous communcations class which focused on the media. However, the information in this book was much more in depth. In my opinion, the most important piece of information in this chapter and in writing news stories is the inverted pyramid model used to write articles. It is very important that a journalist follows this method when submitting an article. Stating the “news lead” and summary first is what draws a reader in or provides a “skimmer” of the basics of an event without reading the whole article. There are a few things that were new to me that I found interesting as well. The first is a somewhat minor detail, but something that will definitely come in handy while writing our news story assignment.  On page 197 it discusses how to use quotations. The rule that stuck out to me is when it says to follow each quotation by using the “simple verb said.” This is contrary to what I have been taught in my experience with creative writing or fiction writing,  where I have been encouraged to use many different verbs in this place to avoid redundancy.  The next thing that stuck out to me is found on page 207 where it discusses ending a news story. It states the news stories do not have a true ending or conclusion paragraph to bring it all together. This also goes against everything I have been taught about writing, where a conclusion is a required and crucial part of every assignment. It was very interesting to learn that this method was adapted from news stories being “chopped off” to make room other articles placed into publications. Overall, this chapter provided an excellent model for how to compose a quality article for our assignment.