Assignments: Final Project Requirements

In addition to participation in class and maintaining your blog, you will be graded on an individual course project due before the end of term. See http://www.hkstories.net/jmsc-online/2010/10/20/welcome-to-the-online-journalism-workshop for grading breakdowns.

DEADLINES ARE IMPORTANT. YOU WILL LOSE MARKS FOR LATE SUBMISSIONS AND RISK FAILING THIS COURSE. Be warned: Some students are at risk scoring 0 for their blogs. A number missed the first deadline for their draft project. This will be reflected in their grades.

YOU MUST CLEAR YOUR PROJECT WITH A CLASS INSTRUCTOR. DUPLICATION IS NOT PERMITTED, ALTHOUGH SOME OVERLAP MAY BE ACCEPTABLE. PLEASE RESERVE AND DISCUSS YOUR TOPIC ON THE CLASS WIKI.

(NB the Classwiki is now locked for final topics — if you hadn’t posted in time you missed that deadline. Please discuss your project direct with instructors)

1. All assignments, including the final assignment, should be uploaded to your blog — elements uploaded elsewhere (eg to youtube or our ftp server) should also be linked to from your class blog

2. Your final project will be ported to the class project website at http://www.hkstories.net/fall2010/ — and you will be given access to the site to tweak your project, adjust the layout etc

3. Your individual online report will be a multiple media report about this semester’s theme:  User Friendly/Unfriendly Hong Kong.

It will combine text, links, pictures and/or graphics, audio and other elements as appropriate.

The written text is not supposed to be too long, the point is to show that you know how to tell a story in an innovative way by combining different elements to best tell the story using the appropriate media/medium.

Your final project MUST include the following:

• A soundslides of no less than 2.5 mins and no more than 3 mins in length
• An audio-only component
• A map element
• A graphics element
• A photographic essay element
• Text
• Appropriate hyperlinks and metadata (including SEO-friendly headlines, tags and headers)

The above are minimum requirements. Utilisation of other elements (eg polls, video etc) are up to you. But they must be used in an appropriate manner and not just for the sake of it.

Layout IS important. Final stories that are slapped together in one long column so as to resemble any old blog will lose marks.

Deadlines:

• The draft of your final project is due at noon on Thursday, November 25 (ie ahead of Lecture 5)
• Your completed project is due at noon on the day before your final lab session (week six)

To Reiterate:

• Text should NOT EXCEED 800 words, but can be as little as 400-500 if you are relying on strong visual, graphic, and audio elements to tell your story. This is NOT a term paper or newspaper story.
• Make coherent use of multiple media elements to tell the story you have chosen.
• You WILL be evaluated on whether you tell a story clearly and journalistically, in a way that a member of the public (i.e., somebody who is neither your teacher or your relative who is not obsessed with your topic) would actually want to spend time reading/watching/listening. The longest and most complicated story will NOT necessarily get the best grade – less is often more when you are trying to tell a compelling story to a general audience.
• The website is in English for an English-speaking audience. Assume that you are working for a news organization whose editors and audience cannot read or understand Chinese. Therefore your work must be comprehensible to non-Chinese speakers as well as to people who do not live in Hong Kong.
• Professional standards of language usage, grammar, punctuation, and spelling apply to your web work in the same way that they apply to your print stories.

IT’S A GOOD IDEA TO CHECK OUT AVOIDING COMMON PITFALLS BEFORE YOU FILE!