jour201 week 3 discussions all topics latest 2015

Instead of a final exam this semester, you will do a final project that involves attending--in person--a public meeting of a group of officials. You must get my approval for the meeting you will cover.

You may cover a public meeting of any official group, like a state Legislature or legislative committee; or a meeting of any city council, county council/county commissions, school board, zoning commission or other governmental body. If you live on a military base, you may cover any regularly scheduled meeting of officials that is open to the members of your community.

You may not cover a meeting that is not open to the public (or, in the case of a military base, open to the general community).

You may not cover an informal meeting; it has to be an official meeting of officials--most likely government officials.

You may not cover a meeting that you will participate in or offer your opinion at.

You may not cover a meeting that you do not attend live and in person. You may not cover a meeting that you watch on video/YouTube either live or later. You must be there.

By 11:59 p.m. this Thursday you must post your formal final project proposal and meeting agendas as a response to this post. That proposal should include the following information about TWO meetings that you are available to attend in person between now and the end of Week 6. (You need to identify two in case one falls through or in case you attend one and it does not produce any newsworthy action for your story.)

--the name of the official group whose meeting you will cover

--the time, date and location of the meeting

--the topic of the meeting. Example: The regularly scheduled monthly meeting of the College Park City Council

--the agenda of the meeting. Call the office of the group that is meeting and ask for the agenda or ask what might be coming up on the agenda. If the meeting is a public meeting, the agenda is public information. If the agenda hasn't been published yet, review news accounts of previous meetings to find out what might be coming up on the organization's agenda then call the organization to confirm as much as you can.

--an explanation why the meeting is newsworthy. Find out if there are any controversial items on the agenda or any items pending for which votes are scheduled. See if there are items coming up that the organization has been dealing with for some time.

Post this information here no later than 11:59 p.m. Thursday. Failure to post this information by the deadline may result in a 10 percent reduction in your final project’s final grade. The final project itself is worth 25 percent of your final grade for this course.

Once you have posted your proposal, please review all of your classmates' posts, providing advice on how they might ago about researching background material for their embedded links, the kinds of questions they might ask before and after the meeting, whom they should interview during pre-meeting preparations, etc. Use these comments to help you fortify your story! Your peer reviews are due by no later than 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

If you're not sure if your meeting will qualify for this assignment, just ask me. But if you cover an unapproved meeting, you won't get credit for the story; if you cover an unapproved meeting and it turns out that it doesn't qualify, you may not get credit for the assignment either. In both cases, you may lose 25 percent of your final course grade as a result (which means you won't get more than a D in the class).

(Response required.)

You have a quiz on the replacement of passive voice with active voice verbs at the end of this week. If you would like some more practice, try a few of these sentences on for size in this optional Try It #5!

Pick oneof the following summary news leads below and rewrite it to eliminate its passive voice. Then tell us what you changed, and why by explaining what was wrongwith it and how you corrected it. Justify any grammar corrections with references to the specific rule in your course AP Stylebook and Active Voice lectures in the Course Content.If we run out of these sentences before everyone has had a chance to do one, then try writing one of your own to challenge us with!

1. Authorization for the story was provided to the reporter after the editor was told there was enough money in the budget by the publisher.

2. It wasn't immediately clear whether there were additional fatalities, according to police.

3. A 17-year-old Monroe County girl who pleaded guilty in a drunken-driving crash that killed a Carmody woman was sentenced Monday in juvenile court to 30 days of detention at the county jail and 500 hours of community service.

4. There are 27 schools that the school chancellor wants to close on the list.

5. A key figure in the D.C. tax scandal is among the 11 government workers charged by police in what is being called the biggest corruption scandal in the capital city’s history.

6. More than $1 million in expenditures to a well-connected Republican consultant are being reviewed by ’s comptroller.

7. Two people were killed, including the operator of the crane, when a crane toppled onto a high-rise apartment building in the Upper East Side on Friday.

8. Three Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall were denied their Fulbright scholarships by the State Department because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

9. The federal government is considering allowing loaded, concealed weapons to be carried by visitors in some of the national parks, wildlife refuges and monuments.

10. The voting rights of two men were restored by the Board of Elections yesterday, 20 years after they were stripped of them because they were found to be not guilty of murder by reason of insanity.

11. super delegates were pressed Thursday by the two top Democrats in Congress to go public with their preferences for their party’s next presidential nomination by the middle of the week.

12. Appointments to the court were approved by the Senate panel in a 12-11 vote taken as the hearing ended.

13. Four motorists were killed by automobile accidents over Memorial Day weekend.

14. With five seconds left in the game, an illegal time-out was called by one of the players.

15. To save time, the story was dictated to the rewrite desk by the reporter.

Post your initial response to this optional Try It! here as a reply in this discussion forum, then peer review at least two of your classmates’ efforts by Sunday. The deadline for your Try It! exercise is Thursday.

(Response optional.)

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