Term 2 Writing Module: Postcards from China
Michael Jordan will lead students, step by step, through the process of how to develop serious and responsible, deep and meaningful text reporting. The course, entitled “Postcards from China” will produce feature pieces, aimed at a smart, curious, international audience, and will be part of your second Term 2 Multimedia Journalism projects, published online.
Postcards from China: will form “serious and responsible, deep and meaningful” foreign correspondence that will both “open a window” onto China for a smart, curious, global, online audience - and complement the visual and other elements of students’ broader Multimedia project. The aim is for you to go through a rigorous process of producing a text report of publishable standard.
Even more, this fact-based, human lead storytelling (in 800 words, or so) will also become a centrepiece of your journalism portfolio, a piece you will be proud to show any prospective employer. Giving you a broad skills set — Here are my video skills, my photo skills, my writing skills. Hire me, because I can handle it all.
In Poynters report: Core Skills for Future Journalism, (see embed below), journalism professionals and tutors widely agree that solid writing is a critical skill set. Karen Magnuson, editor and vice president/news at the Democrat and Chronicle Media Group in Rochester, N.Y., expressed that alongside visual and digital skills solid writing and reporting is vital.
“My personal experience with journalism grads is that they fall into one of two categories: solid writers/reporters with limited digital skill sets or multimedia journalists who are great with video but don’t understand how to work a beat or dig much deeper than what’s given in a press release or press conference. Both types are problematic in today’s newsrooms. We need it all!”
Michael Jordan will draw upon his own first hand experience as a foreign correspondent over the past 20 years.
Michael has reported from 30 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, ex-Soviet republics and Southern Africa — for Foreign Policy magazine, Agence France-Presse, Christian Science Monitor, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. Over the past 12 years, he has taught journalism to students and professionals, from New York to Hong Kong, from Prague to Lesotho.
Michael’s writing module will take place during your second Term 2 Project. It will take place over a 5 week period. The piece should fit with your project. It may be an integral part of your multimedia reporting or it maybe a separate entity depending on the format, platform and approach to your project.
Session 1: 22 March — One full day to share Michael’s research, reporting and interviewing philosophies, strategies and techniques. Students practice these skills — and start to visualise their own Postcard. NOTE: This is the second week of your planning week for your second Term 2 Project, by this time you will already have a story angle.
Session 2: 29 March — One full day to aid students research topic; determine “movement” within the story; back it up with facts; plot a reporting strategy; identify sources “on the front-lines”; write interview- request letters; etc. We also discuss the “Diamond” story structure, to envision the elements students will need to collect: open with a real person on the front-lines whose mini-story symbolises “The Big Picture”; connect dots to the Big Picture nationwide, underpinned by facts (XXX is one of hundreds/thousands/millions in a similar situation…); then a “Big Picture Expert” to help connect the dots, explaining why exactly this story is important; and so on. NOTE: This is the third and final week of your planning week for your second Term 2 Project, by this time you will already have a firm story angle, this session will help you to finalise your reporting strategy ready for your three week practical reporting assignment.
Deadline for postcards: 21st April. — On the 21st you will come into class and copy edit in pairs your ‘postcards’ before emailing submission. Michael will then rigorously critique student stories. Note: the deadline is set during the final days of your second Term 2 project practical reporting.
Session 3: 25 / 26 April. — One half-day oral critique, with each piece (respectfully) dissected up on the screen, as we brainstorm ways to improve them. After this session, each student will have both a written and oral critique: in effect, a “roadmap” for how to strengthen the piece through further research, reporting, interviewing, rewriting. You have a further 4 days to make revisions for term 2 submission. If you will expand this story in Term 3 then you will have time during term 3 to make major revisions and expand on the existing reporting.
We endeavor to have Michael during the first edit week of Term 3 to critique your final projects and give you editorial guidance to really polish written elements to publication standard.
The importance of reading. To get the most out of this course you will need to familiarise yourself with quality feature writing. You will gain very little from the course if you do not understand what you are aiming at. Here is a short but highly selected reading list.
Here is a selected reading list:
There are a collection of five stories here:
Want to see some feature text in multimedia reporting…
If you make it through all of these, take your pick from…
Michael J. Jordan Biography — Michael is an American journalist, journalism educator and Communications Consultant who recently relocated from Africa to Beijing. However, he’s no stranger to China: he’s a six-time Visiting Scholar in Hong Kong Baptist University’s renowned International Journalism program, teaching the short, intensive Foreign Reporting from Hong Kong workshop he created — and has guest-lectured to journalism students at Tsinghua, Fudan and other prominent Chinese universities. During his 20 years as a foreign correspondent, Michael has reported from 30 countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, ex-Soviet republics and Southern Africa — for Foreign Policy magazine, Agence France- Presse, Christian Science Monitor, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, and many others. Over the past 12 years, he has taught journalism to several thousand students and professionals on four continents: from New York to Hong Kong, from Prague to Lesotho.
He recently spoke at a Tsinghua conference on “Innovation in Economic Communications,” is scheduled to give two guest-lectures to the journalism students of Renmin University, and is a Communications Consultant for the UN’s International Labor Organization, to help raise awareness of ILO efforts to promote “Decent Work” in China. Meanwhile, he continues to lead a Foreign Correspondent training course in Prague (which, this past July, included a group of 15 Chinese student-journalists from the Shanghai International Studies University), and in February 2016, will return to Hong Kong Baptist University for a seventh time.
Before moving to China, Michael spent three-plus years in the tiny African kingdom of Lesotho — which suffers the world’s second-highest rate of HIV infection (23%) and malnutrition that stunts 40 percent of its toddlers. As a Communications Consultant and Health Journalism Trainer, his clients included the United Nations, World Bank and U.S. Embassy. Before he left, he completed one of his most meaningful projects: a consultancy for Management Sciences for Health, focused on Lesotho’s HIV Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC). He trained 20 local activists to bring to life their impact through fact-based, “humanized” storytelling, then ventured into the mountains to interview 24 OVCs and caregivers — to illustrate how MSH intervention has improved their lives. (MSH will soon publish his stories and photos in a book.)
Michael was also the lone Western correspondent in Lesotho during the military coup-attempt of August 2014. He covered the post-putsch crisis, exploring the root-causes of corruption and political violence. (Here’s also the two-minute trailer for his documentary on racial healing in the new South Africa, The Clubhouse: A Post-Apartheid Story.) Meanwhile, he’s developed two of his own communication methodologies: The Fork in the Road and The Communications Triangle. For a sense of his storytelling methodology, Deutsche Welle — the global German broadcaster — recently published his how-to guide to international reporting in its Beyond Your World training-the-trainers handbook.
