JRN 200: Your Practice Story Homework

Since we are not having class this entire week, your homework covering your entire week is included in this and the following blog posts. (Also, please note I don't leave for my conference until Wednesday morning, so I am still available for you during office hours Mondays and Tuesday during regular business hours.)

For this week, you will have TWO practice story assignments to do. The first one is slugged POLICE. For this one, use information provided in Reporting For The Media 10th Edition, Ch. 18, Ex. 3, p. 481. YOU ARE TO WRITE JUST ONE STORY REGARDING THE REPORT ON P. 481 ONLY. PLEASE IGNORE OTHER DIRECTIONS.

For this exercise, the incident is taking place in Okemos. The store is also located in Okemos. The responding authorities are from the Ingham County Sheriff's Department.

Your deadline for POLICE will be no later than 9 a.m. Tuesday, to omars@msu.edu.

Now, the POLICE exercise is a bit different from previous practice stories, in that instead of being given a set of information, you are being given a mock police report form which to discern information, make sense of what happened and write your story.

For you to be able to figure things out, you need to know what military time is. The police report, like most police and fire reports, are written in military time, which differs somewhat from regular time.

In regular time, the daily clock is divided into two 12-hour clocks. For example, we have 12 hours of the morning (known as a.m.), and 12 hours of the afternoon (known as p.m.). The number indicates how many hours we are into the morning or afternoon. Like, 8 a.m. is eight hours into the morning. 2:30 p.m. is two hours, 30 minutes into the afternoon. Duh, right?

Now, let's compare that to military time. In military time, the daily clock is a single 24-hour clock, where the number indicates how many hours we are past midnight, and into the day.

For example, 0500 hours is equal to 5 a.m., since it's five hours into the day. 1430 hours is equal to 2:30 p.m., since 2:30 p.m. is 14 hours, 30 minutes after midnight.

The reports will list information in military time, but for the stories we must translate that info into regular time, since the latter is the time people in regular society use.


*****


Also, due by 9 a.m. Wednesday will be a practice story, slugged RESCUE. For this story, use the fire department report found in Ch. 18, Ex. 6, p. 492 of RFTM, 10th Edition. Please send your assignment to omars@msu.edu.

For this exercise, the city and fire department in question are those of East Lansing. Also, military time is used in this report, which you'll have to translate into regular time. Use the primer on military time shown above.

Also, please keep working on your first out-of-class story rewrite. Your deadline for that is still no later than 9 a.m. Friday, via email to omars@msu.edu. Please follow all directions as highlighted in previous blog posts and the syllabus, and good luck!

Plus, if you haven't yet, please review the following blog posts with the Out-Of-Class #1 slugs on' em. It'll do ya good.

Class will resume Tuesday, Oct. 29 at 9:10 a.m. Om the mean time, have a nice week, ev'ry buddy!