Thursday

For reading time today:
http://www.Digg.com     Pick 1 story to read.  Write a 2 sentence summary and a 3 sentence personal response.

CLASS ACTIVITY FOR TODAY:


 Try to remember the most exciting thing you ever witnessed--a daring rescue, a momentous sporting event, the birth of a child. Imagine that someone has approached you immediately after the event and has asked you to describe it. Are you now a journalist? That is, is the story you are about to recount journalism, or is it some form of literature?

The answer depends on what kind of "story" you present. Is it a strictly factual account of people, places, and events? Does it primarily tell who, what, when, where, why, and how? Most of us would probably agree that this kind of story is journalism. At its core, journalism is an attempt to convey timely, useful information--that is, "news"--to readers or viewers in a truthful way. It may use sounds and pictures, but its primary vehicle is language.

Is your "story"  an imaginative evocation of the event? Have you employed creative use of sounds or figurative language? Is your purpose to elicit an emotional response from your audience? Have you invented details to deepen the meaning or effect of the story? We are inclined to think of this kind of story as literature. In its various forms--fiction, poetry, drama, even some forms of nonfiction--literature generally seeks to enlighten or move us through the imaginative use of language and incident.

Though different at their cores, journalism and literature are not always distinct. That is, while some of the qualities described above help to characterize them, they also share a number of similarities. Both, after all, primarily use language to capture and convey the human experience. Someone has famously proclaimed that journalism is "history in a hurry," suggesting that news reporters record the events that ultimately tell the story of people on earth. Similarly, literature often provides glimpses of not only the events of a time period, but the general mentality of its people. Both journalism and literature also capitalize on interest. In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Edgar Allan Poe emphasized the value of originality in creating a poem, and someone else once defined news as something with an unusual quality, noting that a dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is. Finally, both journalism and literature seek to effect change or move their audiences. A newspaper's job, it has been said, is to "raise hell." Some literary works, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, also raise hell. Others, such as the satires of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, may effect a different kind of change by making us aware of the weaknesses in our personalities. Still others--the lyric poems of Poe and William Shakespeare, for example--heighten our awareness of the world or perhaps merely entertain us. In any case, all literature has some kind of impact. In short, journalism and literature are similar in many respects. In fact, we might consider journalism as a literary genre--that is, a type of writing with its own set of conventions.

YOUR TASK:
Choose something that happened to you today (or any time in your lifetime) and write a paragraph in which you "cover" it as a journalist.  Post it to your blog as an assignment. 

Tomorrow we will evoke this event in a brief work of literature. How are the two pieces of writing different? How are they similar? How might you write a third account that combines elements of journalism and literature?