3 things for journalism students

Friday, August 31, 2012
Three things I'll tell students in the first session of Roosevelt University's Journalism 319 News Reporting class today:
* You have the right to understand everything taught and the right to demand alternative explanations until you do. (That's what good reporters do!)

* You'll learn something useful every class.

* You won't be bored.

If at any time you find the class fails to live up to these standards, please advise your professor immediately. (Sample: "Hey, Charlie: This is boring!")
Want to audit the class, held 9:30 a.m. each Friday? Want to volunteer as a guest speaker? Email me.

P.S. I'm excited about returning to the college-prof role, but it in no way marks the end of my quest for a full-time job. Spread the word.

4 comments:

Jack Leyhane said...

Charlie, be sure you teach how to ask.

This goes back more than 35 years -- I was a college student working for a lawyer. In those days, before the world was on line, in order to mount assessment challenges, we had to pull 'property record cards' from the 'vault' in the County Building on floor 3½.

With me in line that day was a similarly-aged young woman. She gets up to the counter and starts 'demanding' to find out everything there was to know about a particular property. Of course, she was promptly given the brush and she squawked all the louder for it.

I engaged her in conversation and discovered she was a Medill student -- and she'd been given an address and told that she was to find out 'everything' about the property. (I'm guessing it may have been her professor's house or something similar.) She thought that meant she had to go all Mike Wallace on the poor guy at the counter.

I showed her how to fill out the slip or the card or whatever it was back then to get the file she wanted. As I recall, she then got the file and probably went on to fame and fortune in a major media market. (Except for any karma credit I may have earned for doing a good deed, my flirting went unrewarded.)

She needed to learn, as my grandmother used to say, you catch a lot more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

Charlie Meyerson said...

Thanks, Jack. Good stuff. Next Friday at 9:30 a.m.: "How to interview."

http://meyerson.blogspot.com/2012/08/a-guide-to-interview-techniques-for.html

May I quote you?

Charlie Meyerson said...

Oops. Sorry. Interviewing is Friday, Sept. 14.

Jack Leyhane said...

You can quote my grandmother, too.