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Popular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Nov. 14 — Won’t you be my neighbor?
We spent a fair amount of time Wednesday discussing Tom Junod’s 8,100-word profile of Mister Rogers. It ran 14 (!!) years ago in Esquire and it’s still one of those pieces that makes me tear up. It’s beautifully constructed. Its paragraphs are dense but many of its sentences are deliberately simple, mirroring Fred Rogers’s way…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recaps for Nov. 5 and 7 — Weingarten week!
Sorry for the delay in recapping. You can tell that the semester has reached the frenzy point here at the School of Journalism. My crew in the Pollner seminar (aka this class) is spread so thin that you can hear the knives clanking in their mayonnaise jars; just being around them makes me vicariously exhausted.…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 31 — Shaggs’ own thing
Last Wednesday’s class was more of a had-to-be-there thing. As we move into reading and talking about long (or sometimes just long-ish) narratives, our class sessions are becoming more and more like a book group. (Without wine and Trader Joe’s-style nosh, alas.) We wonder “how’d she get that?” and try to think of answers. We…
Read MoreIn the middle of all this, another TONSIL book giveaway: Eric Deggans! David Von Drehle!
More interesting-looking books have just come out, written by people I know and like. Act quick and you could get a copy for yourself. I’ve purchased TWO copies each of new books by David Von Drehle and Eric Deggans: Deggans, the extremely sharp and prolific TV/media critic for the Tampa Bay Times, is out with…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 29 — What is this REALLY about?
My day never really gets going until I read what Nancy Nall has to say, as well as her regular commenters. Reading her blog has been a daily habit for, gosh, maybe a decade now. Lately, both in class and in the Kaimin critiques on Friday (the student-run paper at the University of Montana), I’ve…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 24 — television without pity
Busy class on Wednesday. We finished up critiquing the personal essay riffs: Dustin on “Lost”; Cody on “The Gong Show” reruns; Ashley on “Supernatural” and boy bands; Allison on “The Office’s” Jim & Pam romance; and Carli on loving the ’80s, even though she missed the ’80s entirely. Good discussions. Then we talked about progress…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 22 — personal essay critiques
Although I didn’t plan it this way, it worked out nicely that Monday’s critique session in class was the day Alice Thorpe came to visit Journalism 494. Alice is the mother of Anthony Pollner, the Montana alum in whose memory all of this happens. She came from New York for her annual trip to visit…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 17 — How they did that scene story
We spent most of Wednesday’s class period talking about the five scene stories I assigned for readings. These are each different kinds of scene stories, and I want the students to keep these handy as they work on their own scene stories, due Nov. 7. The first one is a ride-along (literally), as Dan Zak…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 15 — the divine scene story
We’re delving into scene stories now, and what do I mean by that? It’s a feature that’s not too long, heavy on narrative and vivid detail, that takes a reader into a place they might not normally go, or were too busy to get to, or don’t have the access to. Reporting on a trial…
Read MorePopular Culture Journalism (JOUR494): Class recap for Oct. 10 — Juggalos and other frights
Today’s assignment was to watch Sean Dunne’s remarkable, 23-minute documentary, American Juggalo, and think about how you would have handled that assignment — to spend a couple of days in the midst of the juaggalos at their annual bacchanal in an Illinois campground each August. Factor in everything: the kind of people you’d be talking…
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