Monday, May 30, 2011

A first assignment

At the SJMC commencement this year, Rick Reilly, a CU alum and nationally known sportswriter, gave a speech that provided a few jokes and some advice to aspiring journalists. A couple of weeks later, Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog for The New York Times, had his own advice for young journalists in a speech he gave at Columbia. The URLs for both speeches are below.

The assignment? Read the two speeches and compare them. On what points to Reilly and Silver agree? And on what points do they disagree? And based on the advice of these two senior journalists, what's the one thing you can do differently -- starting today -- to become a better journalist?

Provide your response in a blog post to the class blog.


Excerpts from Rick Reilly's speech at CU:
http://journalism.colorado.edu/2011/05/13/rick-reilly-without-journalism-there-will-be-nothing-to-tweet-text-bing-blog-flog-poke-post-share-smoke-signal-or-quilt-about/

http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/system/documents/477/original/nate_silver.pdf

1 comment:

  1. Liz and Rick,

    I wasn't sure how to post to the blog, so I posted my response on my own blog. Here's the link...

    http://alexandrarose26.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/commencement-assignment/

    - Alex Pilarski

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