MEDIA, FILM, JOURNALISM STUDIES MINOR
This minor went along with the writing practices minor very well, providing and teaching me additional styles of writing as applied to media, film, and journalism. Below are a few examples of courses and writing samples.
News Writing and Reporting
This course taught me the ins and outs of how to write news.
We practiced interviews, had deadlines to post stories to a blog, researched biases, and ran Twitter accounts to keep up with the news. Since it was right before COVID broke out, it was an interesting time to practice reporting. For my final project, I interviewed the founders of the DU Better campaign, and wrote a news report on how they are making an impact.
Syllabus:
In-depth news reporting and writing is one of the most important social contributions of journalism. It requires attention to detail and a strong commitment to fairness, accuracy and multiple-points-of-view reporting. It's time-consuming and it's hard work. It's also extremely rewarding. When done well, it can bring you and your news media organization awards as well as long-term prestige. As the authors of News Reporting and Writing note, not as many news reporters and writers get to do in-depth issues-oriented stories as often as they ought to.
Scriptwriting
I found this course to be challenging but extremely interesting. We read scripts, watched short films, and step by step learned how to use the software Final Draft.
​
Since I took this course during the beginning of lockdown, I felt really at a lack of inspiration to bring a story to life.
​
Throughout the quarter we formulated our storylines, created characters, and peer-reviewed each other until our scripts were completed.
​
I ended up basing my script and storyline off of a fire that happened in my hometown that burned down a hotel.
Syllabus:
Film and television industry professionals recognize writing as the most essential element for any successful entertainment endeavor whether you want to go into directing, producing, managing talent, development or whatever. Fortunately, good writing is a skill that
can be learned – with daily practice and commitment. Good writers all say they draft projects, edit their work constantly, and realize that the first draft is never the final draft. The most successful writers, take feedback, alter their work, and keep refining until they or their clients are satisfied. In this class, we treat writing as a process. Consequently, scripts are not written, they are rewritten. Because this is a writing class, you will be practicing your writing a great deal throughout the quarter. You will be given the opportunity to work step by step in developing a screenplay, work on and polish drafts and get feedback along the way. This mimics the process of a professional writer. This class will delve into both the general and intricate elements involved in writing the short narrative film. The goal for these 10 weeks is to develop a short script for an 8-10 minute film.