Course schedule and activities 

Learning to use the cameras, software: In the first few weeks of this class you'll be learning how to use the digital video cameras and how to edit your videos using Adobe Premiere and Audacity. Some people will master the software more quickly than others, but there are dozens of video tutorials on the Internet that you can watch to get up to speed, and I encourage you to check those out. 

Editing labs: The bulk of your coursework will involve producing your four news videos. The shooting of your raw footage will be done largely on your own time, although there may be times when you can shoot some footage in class. But since editing the videos is time-consuming, I have so far scheduled eight lab sessions throughout the semester in which the class period will be yours for editing videos (you can see the dates on the course syllabus). These sessions generally coincide with the production schedule of the Centurion, so if you come into class with no footage to work with, you could either shoot some footage or edit stories for the paper. But I highly recommend that you make use of these lab sessions to edit your videos. 

Note: you will need to be able to save your video projects from one class to the next. We will have a folder available on the Centurion network for storing raw footage and unfinished videos, but you should also get a high-capacity USB drive for saving your work as well. These could be purchased quite cheaply at the bookstore or local retail outlets. 

Broadcast newswriting: Broadcast writing is quite different from writing for print, so we will be doing broadcast newswriting exercises in class throughout the semester, usually from exercises in my book.

Critiquing videos: Another part of this course will involve critiquing and analyzing news videos produced by various news organizations. So before each class on Tuesday, I'd like you to send me a link to a news video that you have found that you find particularly interesting, especially good or bad, or whatever. We will watch the video in class and then discuss it. Again, these should be news videos, not YouTube vids of cats playing the piano. They can be taken from a variety of news outlets, anything from CNN to Vice to The New York Times. I have a list of some of these outlets on the syllabus. We will also watch all the videos created by members of the class. 

Broadcast journalism history: this is not a history course but we will be discussing some of the important events and personalities in the history of broadcast journalism. To that end, we will be watching several feature films on this topic. 

Documentaries: you will be producing relatively short videos, but longform video journalism will also be discussed in this class, and we will be watching several documentaries that are good examples of this kind of work.