Fall Semester Online Journal Portfolio Project
Every week (except holidays and for special circumstances) you will be producing an article for the Online Journal that will be published on the website. Completion of these articles as well as related assignments having to do with the Journal will be worth 100 points for the Project category in AP Comp Gov and 200 points for the writing category of Comp Lit.
Grading criteria for these articles will differ depending on the particular assignments, but in general assignments will be graded for professionalism of writing and presentation, demonstration of critical thinking, and research (depth, accuracy, citation, etc.). These criteria will also be the basis for a portion of the grade that will be determined holistically on the above criteria. For any missing assignment, an additional 10 points will be deducted from the Portfolio grade.
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One of the basic assignments for the portfolio is the articles summary assignment. For this assignment you are required to work with a number of articles from respectable news sources all dealing with the same event in the country you’ve been assigned. First, you are to present an “executive summary” of the three pieces (a “lede”) highlighting the major facts of the event and the major differences in coverage between the articles. This “executive summary” should be no more than three sentences. Second, you are to provide a more analytical summary of the event that all of the articles are focused on, highlighting any major differences in the facts presented by the different sources, differences of tone, and the sorts of sources that the different articles draw upon. Lastly, conclude by giving a broader view: how this event fits into larger trends within the country, how the coverage of this event reveals something about the news sources themselves, or whatever contextualization fits the nature of the articles.
For the first assignment you must deal with three such articles, at least two of which is produced by reporters from within the country. For the United States group, at least two of the articles must be produced by a paper that is not headquartered in the US. For countries whose papers are not written in English, use Google Translate <http://translate.google.com/translate_t#>. For the European Union, articles need to focus on issues that affect the EU as a whole rather than individual countries (although there is obvious overlap). Article topics for the country should not overlap, so the group will need to coordinate so that multiple reporters are not covering the same topic.
A good place to start is <http://news.yahoo.com/topics/> (add the name of your country after the last slash; the European Union doesn’t have its own topic, so just do a news search for it).
For a sample of what this assignment should generally look like, see “Today’s Papers” at Slate.com. Go to the Comp Gov assignments page to see a student sample.