JRN 200: Welcome To The Fall 2015 Edition!

Seriously, welcome. I'm glad to have you here. Let's talk about this class in greater detail.

First, a little about me. You can just call me Omar, since (as you can see from the syllabus) my last name is a mess. I've been at MSU for the past eight years, formerly advising at The State News and currently teaching JRN 200, 300 and 400. Before that, I was a professional journalist for 17 years, most recently in Las Vegas, and I've covered everything from car crashes to Hurricane Katrina.

And in those 17 years I learned a lot, namely this: in journalism we learn by doing. That is, we report and write, then we review what we did well and what we could have done better, then we put those lessons in practice the next time around. Each day in those 17 years I got better, some days more than others. You don't learn journalism passively.

To that end, during this semester we will have many writing assignments called practice stories. In these assignments, we will work on a particular area of news writing (which will always be preceded by a text reading assignment and an online lecture or lecture summary) by giving you a set of facts, and then asking you to write a story based on those facts (using the techniques mentioned in our readings and lectures).

Then, we will learn from those practice stories in two ways: first, you will get a personal evaluation of your individual work, where I will go over key points, both good and bad. Second, we will look at prime examples of each others' work via the blog (with names stripped out to protect the innocent), where you will benefit two ways: first, by seeing how your peers handled the exact same assignment; and second, by the blog highlighting good techniques and common mistakes and ways to avoid such errors.

Because we do learn by doing, practice stories will be weighed relatively minimally as to your final course grade. And that's by design. We want you to have the opportunity to make mistakes without seeing a serious dent to your final grade. So if you feel you didn't do well in a few practice stories, don't fret.

What we're building up to will be out-of-class stories, which will be a big part of your final grade. But the goal is to use the practice stories to build good habits and identify and weed out bad ones, so that by the time we get to out-of-class stories you are in a position to kick ass.

With all these writing assignments, we are going to be strict in two particular ways. First, ANY factual error -- even just one misspelled name or incorrect number! -- will automatically result in an assignment grade of 1.0, no matter how well you otherwise did the work.

That's not an arbitrary thing because I'm mean. Rather, it's to emphasize an important point: journalism isn't about writing, it's about getting it right. We write in journalism not for personal expression, but to share information that is relevant, interesting and/or useful to your audience. And if the purpose is to share information, it must be accurate. Wrong info is hardly interesting, relevant or useful to anyone.

Also, errors can be dangerous to your career. When I was working in Vegas, my paper had a five-error-per-year rule. After the first error, you'd get a verbal reprimand. The second one got you a letter in your file. After the third, you had to outline a corrective plan of action. The fourth got you an unpaid suspension. And the fifth got you fired. And this was while I was writing over 200 stories a year! Gulp.

I'm not saying this to scare you; rather, it is to motivate you to have good fact-checking habits in place so it never gets that drastic. (I was never fired during my professional career and I'm not a genius, so I know it can be done, and done easily), and to impress upon you that truth is the cornerstone of what we do.

Odds are you're going to have a few "fatals" (as we call 'em) in your practice story. That's okay; virtually everyone who has taken my JRN 200 class has had multiple fatals, especially in the first half of the semester when everything is new and good habits are still being built. Don't be scared of 'em and don't fret; just learn how you can do a better job of fact-checking, and become aware of some common traps that lead people into fatals.

Second, we are going to enforce deadlines to the second. So, let's say an assignment is due at 9 a.m. sharp, and it's time-stamped on my email as having been received at 9 a.m. and four seconds. I will unmercifully grade that assignment as late, and late assignments automatically get a 0.0.

Again, I'm not doing that to be a jerk. There's a journalistic reason for that. And that this is a deadline business in which we can NEVER miss a deadline. Ever. If you're writing a script for the 11 p.m. news, the scripts have to be in before 11 p.m., each and every time. After all, you've never flipped on the news and hard the anchor say, "Welcome to the 11 o'clock news. Just give us a minute and we'll get back to you." It's because people who blow deadlines are immediately exiled, so we have to start building a habit of never missing deadlines.

I'd rather have you learn that lesson here than during your first (or would it be, last?) job.

Okay, I know all of this can sound intimidating. And I can't promise that you won't have frustrations, especially early on. But these things I can guarantee you: first, YOU CAN DO THIS! I'm not asking you to lift a two-ton truck over your head; I'm asking you to master skills that have been mastered before. And I know you can master them because you are a student at a Big Ten school. That tells me all I need to know about whether you have the talent. You do.

But that doesn't mean that you'll come out firing on all cylinders on the first day. Starting something new is hard, even when it's something you have the talent in which to shine. I mean, the first time Michael Phelps ever went swimming, he probably needed floaties and such. It didn't mean he wouldn't eventually become the greatest swimmer of all time. It just meant that he had to learn how to bring his skills out. That's what we'll do here, too.

Second, I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO DO THIS ALONE! I'm here to help. I'll offer you tricks and techniques on how to avoid fatals and get assignments in on time and structure your stories properly and do kick-ass reporting. We're in this together, and I've shepherded plenty of people through this class before. I know we can do this.

So if you have a day that's frustrating, don't get frustrated. Don't punch a wall or drop the class. Just learn the lessons on how to do better the next time, and then do just that.

Again, that's how we learn in journalism. And that's how we'll learn this semester. Just stick with it, and I'll be there for you.