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2024 Fall

FEATURE WRITING - JRN300 Fall 2024


Course
David Vaughan
For information about registration please contact our admissions.

A short description of the course

/files/3125989/JRN300-Feature_Writing-F24-Vaughan.pdf

This course moves beyond basic journalistic reporting and news writing. Students will gain experience in writing longer, impactful feature articles. We’ll work on techniques to find angles and develop them into research-based non-fiction stories that have characters, show development and follow a structural, narrative arc from beginning to end. The class is run as a magazine editorial team, with students pitching their stories and workshopping their drafts. We shall look at different ways of writing for different platforms and at multimedia aspects of feature writing, including audio and video.

Here is the course outline:

1. Lesson 1

Sep 5

Introduction to the course

2. Lesson 2

Sep 12

Profile Writing

3. Lesson 3

Sep 19

Profile Writing 2

4. Lesson 4

Sep 26

The Ladder of Abstraction

5. Lesson 5

Oct 3

Profile Writing: peer reviews and preparation for next week's visit from the Czech journalist Jan Bělíček.

6. Lesson 6

Oct 10

Feature Writing: finding the story Visit from Czech journalist, Jan Bělíček

7. Lesson 7

Oct 17

Feature Writing

8. Lesson 8

Oct 24

Prix Bohemia: Assessing radio reports submitted to the international competition Prix Bohemia, October 2024

9. Lesson 9

Nov 7

Students present their progress on Assignment 2

10. Lesson 10

Nov 21

Marianne Allweiss visit. We shall also hear the remaining student progress reports for Assignment 2

11. Lesson 10

Rewriting a feature story

12. Working with sound...

Nov 30

Using sound as part of the story.

13. Lesson 11

Nov 21

Meeting Marianne Allweiss from German public-service radio ARD

14. Lesson 12: Sound Mixes

Using sound to tell a story

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