Friday, July 11, 2008

J-Workbook: A Work in Progress

Lately, I've been reading these journalism textbooks (yes, I am that much of a dork), and it's really kind of interesting. All history textbooks are pretty much exactly the same- except as you get older the font gets smaller and the books get heavier. But journalism textbooks are not like that.

I'm serious.

On the one hand, you've got The Radical Write. Which as its name suggests is pretty much all about writing. And reporting. It has very few pictures, long chapters, and lots of amazing works by high school journalists that you can read and be inspired by. 

And on the other hand, you've got Inside Reporting, which is written in snippets. It's graphic design heavy. And instead of featuring student work interspersed within the chapters, it has this whole huge clump of articles by very famous journalists. 

And then you've got the internet, floating around. It's got all kinds of sites like Poynter Online with all kinds of advice, forums, and other stuff to help us learn about journalism. 

All very different. All trying to teach the same thing.

The problem is you have to read them.

And journalism is one of those things you can't learn out of a book. You have to do it.

And even though journalism textbooks are actually cool, they're still text books. You're still trying to pick up a craft by reading.

So I've decided to take a whack at writing a journalism textbook. I was going to do it for my journalism honors project last year, but Ms. Webster and I never got around to setting a deadline. I'm going to go ahead and put it together, and I'll hand it out to you guys and the freelancers, probably.

Anyway, my textbook is going to be more of a workbook. It's going to have all kinds of spaces for you to write. To try to dig through notes on imaginary stories that I made up, to answer tough philosophical questions, to take goofy personality quizzes that I revel in writing.

Well, revel's probably not the right word. 

It's one in the morning right now, so I'm not exactly at the top of my writing game.

I'm kind of rambling.

So yeah. Gotta go sleep.

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