Broadcast and Digital Journalism: Boot Camp and Capstone 2013
BOOT CAMP
Our graduate students in BDJ 611 worked on identifying and writing news for broadcast and the online, digital realm. The course focuses on how to find the news, report it, produce and deliver it, under conditions as close to real life in the broadcast news business as possible. They work on improving skills including:
- Writing in traditional broadcast news style
- Writing for online distribution, including short format Web stories
- Interviewing
- Research, including online
- Writing under deadline pressure, including and web-first posting
- Basic TV news writing
- Mobile journalism (all stories were recorded on their iPad minis)
Students reported hundreds of original stories throughout the summer, all posted to our nccnewsonline.com website (If you click on the category that says BDJ 663.1 or BDJ 663.2, you’ll see the students’ stories. Some of the radio stories were aired professionally by the two primary NPR affiliates in Central New York, WAER-FM and WRVO-FM.)
CAPSTONE
The Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University offers a 58-week graduate sequence in broadcast and digital journalism. Each year, students spend the last six weeks of their program in Washington, to gain more exposure to national and international news. The majority of the students spend their Capstone working as reporters for small market television stations in the Nexstar Broadcast group. They are credentialed by the Senate Radio/TV Gallery. Students interview members of Congress, cover Congress and other parts of the federal government as they research, report, write, shoot and edit their own pieces, which we feed to participating stations over the internet. In 2013, markets airing the work of Capstone students included Little Rock, AR; Evansville, IN; Amarillo, TX; Johnstown, PA and Elmira, NY, among others. A smaller number of students chose to work on the production side, and we place them in internships in newsrooms around Washington. This year our participants included USA Today, NBC News, CBS News, WTTG-TV/Fox 5, WAMU – NPR, Chinese Central TV and the PBS Newshour.
