Student Blog
Assessment Value: 30%
Project phase 1: 5 December – 23 December (3 weeks)
Christmas break: 25 December -1 Jan
Project phase 2: 2 January – 15 January (2 weeks)
Students will each be assigned to cover an area of news and current affairs reporting. They will develop a blog to monitor, report and analyse the media's performance in this area. This will lead into the second assignment task which is a class presentation of this research to the class.
Task Requirements
Each student will be allocated a specific area of news and current affairs reporting to monitor and analyse. Up to three students may be allocated the same area. Each student will develop their own blog and they will be required to:
- post at least 3 entries a week
- post at least one comment per week on another student blog
- post a minimum of 3500 words on their own blog over the five weeks
Each blog posting should be:
- 200-500word in length
- have 2 or more outward links
Task Aims
This task has three aims:
- to encourage you to research and document the coverage of news and current affairs in local media;
- to encourage you to begin the process of critically reflecting on journalism practice by comparing and contrasting selected ideas, arguments or debates found in journalism studies readings with the journalism practices in your chosen news coverage;
- to encourage you to write up your research as a series of blog postings.
Assessment criteria:
Research skills: appropriate selection of news items and successful collection of relevant links
Critical analysis: demonstrated understanding of the process of comparing and contrasting ideas from the readings with real world experiences of journalism practice as evidenced in the quality of the analysis in your postings
Effective communication: demonstrated ability to write up a series of interesting and appealing posts
Use of blog medium: demonstrated use of the specific attributes of online communication such as effective use of links
