Hello gentle readers. It's time for another NewsU.org course evaluation.
Tonight's course is "Anatomy of a Newspaper: Understanding the Business." The neatest part of this course was the questions at the end of each chunk of info. I enjoyed sitting here thinking about them. The Overview had a cool interactive graphic showing senior management of a newspaper. While not all papers will have VPs of so-and-so and so-forth, it was very informative about what it might be like at a larger newspaper. It was interesting reading Gannett's game plan, the NYT's and Tribune's mission statements and Seattle Time's core values. The next section, Departments, was my favorite. I work in the newsroom as the newsroom assistant, and admittedly I don't (didn't) know too much about what goes on in other departments. Be sure to check out the Major Challenges section under Editorial. The suggestions for improving credibility were pretty stellar. The Case Studies would have been cool if the links had worked. Most links that I clicked were just plain broken. I expect this will be fixed after the site is more thoroughly updated. The Glossary shocked me with its completeness. The terms were clearly defined, and I wish I had a paper version of it. The Media Lit Challenge was a crossword puzzle. It thankfully did not go into as much depth as the rest of the course, and I didn't need to use the Glossary. Whew! The Good Stuff: — Once again, another thorough course from NewsU.org. — On the ones that did work, the interactive graphics were awesomely informative and interesting. The Meh Stuff: — There's a good chunk of reading involved. It's not boring, however. — The end section (crossword) was interesting enough, but it wasn't compelling enough for me to actually finish. The Bad Stuff: — Some parts of the course were missing links. — The missing links really stank. :( Overall Rating: B Unfortunately, this course gets a B due to the fact that the most important interactive parts (the Case Studies) had a ton of broken links, pretty much rendering it unusable. The large amount of information and cool Glossary somewhat made up for the missing links.
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When I walked in my first day at The Chronicle, I was super confident about my grammar.
Three hours later after deadline, I felt like a wilted flower. Everything I had ever known about grammar was wrong. Super wrong. Well, not all of it. Periods, exclamation points and question marks were still the same. I understood misplaced phrases. There are, however, a few distinct differences between the "proper grammar" that I was taught in school and "newsroom grammar." For nearly a month after I started work in the newsroom, I placed quotation marks inside punctuation at the end of sentences. Then one day one of my editors pointed out this error and that I did it repeatedly, and I swear that there are not many times I can remember being that mortified. I found newsu.org, and "Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More" was the first course I ran through. Yeah, I know it's kinda cheater to have already run through this course, but that's the freedom I get as the sole writer of this blog. ;) And, to be fair, I ran through the course again last week and repeat it on a monthly basis as a refresher. On to the review: The Good Stuff: — The course is thorough. It starts with a short quiz to check where you're at in the grammar world. After that, you'll proceed through Grammar, Style, Punctuation and Spelling sections followed by an end test. — The four main parts of the course were problematic areas that I run into daily on the job. The explanations were simple yet thorough, and I was able to easily pick up the concepts with only a few readings. The Meh Stuff: — It will take a while to get through the course. However, this is only "meh" and not "bad" because grammar is something everybody needs, and this course was awesome and shoving it into my brain. The Bad Stuff: — The course took a bit to load on a slower connection; low-speed users beware. Overall Rating: A- I took a few points off for the slow to load bit, but otherwise this course is very much worth your time. I've seen a great deal of improvement in my grammar and spelling since I took the course. It really helped with proofreading, too. Next Up: Anatomy of a Newspaper: Understanding the Business The first course I'm going to take through www.newsu.org will be "Cleaning Your Copy: Grammar, Style and More."
I figured that going through the basics would be a good idea. There are a few things that I probably drive my editors nuts with. At least I stopped putting punctuation (except a colon!) outside of quotation marks. ;) Check back later for comments on the course and my thoughts on how the course was presented. |