Preparing and Writing for a Video Broadcast (Journalism, Mass Media)

This media project complements broadcast journalism courses or feature writing units. The primary objective is for teenage students to produce feature segments on extracurricular offerings at their schools, which may then be used by the school for promotional purposes. This project reinforces the conventions of interviewing skills, organization of details using the inverted pyramid technique, and foundations of broadcast writing.

Included are the following:

• A project description.
• Brainstorming materials designed to maximize student learning about their chosen club (functionally speaking, a KWL).
• A document on which students jot down open-ended questions to ask an interviewee, plus a reflective piece to ensure students have written quality questions.
• A prewriting document designed to help students discern vital information from lesser information, aligned to the inverted pyramid concept.
• An exemplar script modeling the conventions of writing for broadcast, plus instructions for how to write for broadcast.
• A rubric for evaluating student work.

Materials are delivered in Word Document and PDF formats. (Alternatively, a Google Drive option is available.)