Murder: Fatal Errors

Glad to see there was only one fact fatal on this exercise. Here it is:


PROBLEM: We said the restaurant's name was North Pointe Inn when in fact it was North Point Inn, with no "e" at the end of Point.


SOLUTION: We need to be precise with names. Be sure to double-check the spellings of ALL names-- whether of people or businesses or pets or towns or whatever -- both before and after writing.

***

A bigger problem is that we had four people not turn in anything at all, which is a 0.0. And that's much worse than a 1.0 we get for fact fatals. Here's why:

The worst thing we can do in journalism -- even worse than getting a fatal -- is to blow off an assignment. A newspaper can't go to print with blank spots in the pages, and a 30-minute newscast can't to to air without content that fills up all 30 minutes. That means in the media business, you can never miss a deadline.

And yes, to reinforce good habits and deter bad ones, assignments that are not done will have a much more severe impact on your final grade than fatals will, and if I have to use a tie-breaker in determining your final grade, the first categories I will use will be whether you blew off any assignments, since that tells me how seriously you are taking this class.

I express that value in the grading scale. Everything we do in here translates to a 1,000-point scale to which your grade is converted to a smaller subset of points that add up toward that. So when we get a 4.0 you get 100 percent of points, a 3.9 gets us 99 points, a 3.8 gets 98, and so forth.
 
And under that scale, a fact fatal that gets us a 1.0 still gets us 70 points. If we screw up an assignment so bad that we get a 0.1, that's still 61 points.
 
But a 0.0 is zero points. At a 0.1, we're closer to a 4.0 than a 0.0.
 
Again, that's to emphasize that missing your deadline is simply not an option in the media biz. We always need to hit our deadlines. Every single time.
 
Beyond that, none of us can afford to miss a single assignment because we need the practice! You'll soon be working on out-of-class stories (which are our biggest projects that most impact your final grade), and the best way to make sure you're writing it in a proper journalistic manner is to have opportunities with these practice stories to try our best, review our work, keep applying good habits and learn how to fix our bad ones.
 
We can't do that if we don't do that. 
 
Again, the more you tell me you are unreliable as a journalist by skipping assignments and not showing up without a valid excuse, the more I will recognize that in your final grade. I can work with you if you give me an assignment that's not up to snuff -- and so can an editor in a real-world setting -- but I can't work with nothing, and I can't work with you if you're not here. Neither can your future bosses.