Writing Skills III, Journalism, Homework for Week 7 (Next Session May 27th)

For homework, please produce your next essay for submission at our next session. This can be 1) an interview that expands on what you did in class today or an interview with a new person that employs strategies and techniques that you observe in the models distributed in class or in the videos below; 2) a piece of feature writing (see more information about this genre below, keeping in mind that interviews can be a great basis for a feature); OR 3) another entry/article/essay for your individual project (you might want to incorporate an interview into this week's piece).

For inspiration for interviews, have a look at the following sites:
http://www.theguardian.com/tone/interview
http://www.nytimes.com/column/magazine-talk
http://www.vanityfair.com/search?rubric=%22Proust%20Questionnaire%22
Some classic interviewers in the Anglosphere include Charlie Rose (PBS), Larry King (CNN), and Jerry Paxman (BBC Newsnight). George Stromboulopoulos from CBC (Canada) has a great YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheHour
And Conan O'Brien's "Serious Jibber Jabber" features a great interview with the writers from the Simpsons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtJ28qOEG1g
There is also a trend in the comedy world of stand-up comedians producing interview podcasts and web series, one of the more noteworthy being Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee: http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/

Remember that interviews are more than questionnaires: you are looking for the gold in your interviewee and have limited time to get it. Journalists don't last long if they follow bad/dead leads, so you often have to accelerate "finding the good stuff". Be provocative in your questioning, but also be kind to your subject. The best interviewers push, but are never mean or cruel (which doesn't result in truly good material anyway). Put bluntly: lame questions yield lame answers.

On what feature writing is: http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/feature.htm
Good feature writing most often appears in the news magazine format or in the Sunday editions of daily newspapers; great examples in the Anglophone world include the following:
The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/world/
The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/
The Times Literary Supplement http://www.the-tls.co.uk/

There were some student questions on the exam: the date will be determined at the break and I will announce this in our next class. You will have 2 hours to produce a piece of journalistic writing of 400 to 500 words. The exam will feature one or two writing prompts that will be extremely general, so everyone will be able to respond using the topics and knowledge they have been focussing on in their individual work over the course of the semester. I don't expect a specific format, but DO expect you to abide by the conventions of the genre you choose to write in (i.e. a piece of straight journalism cannot morph into commentary; a review requires a certain amount of contextualization, a clear and specific thesis, and appropriate detail). There are no specific formulas to follow. Spelling, grammar, syntactic variation, word choice, clarity, coherence, evidence, and paragraph organization are all areas that your exam will be assessed in. What I can most interested in seeing in those two hours is how well you edit your work.