Assignment

Overview

• For the rest of the semester you are being asked to bring together what you have learned about evidence and inference with all the knowledge and skills you possess as journalists on a final, collaborative multimedia project.
• You will be divided into 2 teams, each of which will address one of the following 2 topics:
• Team A: Retrospect (“What Went Wrong?”)
• Team B: Prospect (“Whither New Orleans?”)
• Each team will be asked to realize this project as both a print piece — a magazine — and a website.

Materials

• A virtual “basket” of materials — reports, raw data and photographs as well as blogs and other more subjective items — has been prepared for your use. For those of you using Windows, most of the materials will open within the right frame; right-click on the links and select “Open in New Window” if you would like to view them at a larger size. For those of you using Macintoshes, the materials will open in separate windows automatically.
• Your project must be 50% composed of materials from the basket, which is much more vast than what you will ultimately use. The other 50% is to be based on your own research.
• You may not excerpt any large chunk of the information in the basket and incorporate into your final piece as is. The basket is to be treated as a source of raw materials from which you will create something else.
• This is not supposed to be an academic or scholarly project, although it must be intelligent, accurate, in-depth and provocative.

Content and Presentation

• The essence of each piece must be clear, compelling and analytical. It must cover new ground, draw new conclusions, and begin with a hypothesis and an alternate hypothesis, both of which can withstand scrutiny. It must employ narrative and other more subjective voices in a way that supports your thesis, creates an empathetic relationship with your viewer (when expedient), is experiential at times, and is verifiable if presented as truth.
• You must consider the history of pre-existing debates on given issues when applicable so that you may contextualize and historicize in such a way that strengthens or bolsters your information.
• You must consider how the questions you ask influence the materials you choose to use, and you must attempt to get beyond your preconceptions and perspectives.
• Though you are not being asked to model your project on an existing magazine or website, you will need to consider the context and target audience. Are you a news publication? An environmental, liberal or conservative publication? Are you based in the South?

Process

• A specialist from the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning will be coordinating designers for both the web and magazine components of your project.
• You will need to determine when are working together as a group, how best to communicate with the CCNMTL specialist, and at what point in the process your team diverges so that some members are focusing on the web and others on the magazine.
• Part of the exercise will be for you to establish a mode of collaborating, your roles, a hierarchy if desirable — ultimately, who is responsible for what — and an efficacious way of working together. Since there are more writers than articles, the articles should be jointly researched and written.

In Class

• Your class time will be orchestrated like a design, art or architectural studio crit. Starting with the third week, you will be asked to present your project on a weekly basis, and to consider the other team’s feedback, criticism, questions and challenges as your project and their response evolves. Your presentations, as well as the way you engage in responding to the other team’s work, are crucial. This part of the course is about a dialog and demands your attentive and thoughtful participation.
• See the Schedule for a week-by-week breakdown of assignments and in-class presentations.

Print Requirements

• The magazine must measure 20 pages and should be comprised of a Table of Contents, 3 features, 2 editorial-type pieces, and some shorter pieces.
• You must include at least 6 photographs, at least 2 charts and graphs (the extent of which depends on the nature of the magazine you are creating) and at least 1 sidebar. You must consider their role: Are they stand-alones? Or do they simply illustrate a point? You must also consider how you are contextualizing what you do visually, as well as how you explicate it, through captions and titles.
• The magazine must manifest a design sensibility that supports your larger concept. You must consider the relationship between text and image (including charts and graphs), make choices about typeface and type size, image sequencing, sizing and juxtapositioning, captions and headlines, pull-quotes, and the publication’s format. You must also carefully consider the cover and any cover-lines.
• There are no ads in your magazine. This is not to suggest that your magazine is not for profit; it’s simply because we don’t want you to fake the exercise of selling ad space.
• While there will be no footnotes (or minimal at best) and you will be sourcing your material as you would for any magazine or newspaper (not academically), you should keep track of all your sources (even those not specified in your writing) and their location in or out of the basket, and hand in an annotated copy of the magazine so we may refer to your sources when reviewing your choices, and also affirm the 50-50 research ratio.

Web Requirements

• The web piece demands similar attention to design as the magazine, although its components will be different. You will have to consider how the site is navigated, how much you will rely on words or icons, hypertext and color.
• Your website should include your homepage and links to at least 4 landing pages. Each of these 4 landing pages should have additional links to at least 1 other page each. Your website should also include at least 1 scroll-down page. As with the magazine, it must include 5 completed longer elements: 3 features and 2 elements suggesting an editorial voice.
• Your website may comprise film or video clips, photographs, some sort of sound component, and time-space elements. You must take advantage of the non-linearity intrinsic to the web.
• It is up to you to determine the way in which your website relates (or doesn’t relate) to the magazine; the magazine may follow the web, for instance, or the web the magazine. There must, however, be some sort of relationship, and the two projects must be integrated in some way. The website should not replicate the materials in the magazine, but must suggest what you are trying to convey in a way that is specific to the web.
• You will need to establish whether or not your website audience is the same as your magazine audience, and the consequences of that decision.
• Your considerations must be philosophical as well as structural. Do you see the web as a “democratic” space? Who has access to your site — only subscribers, or everyone? Is the website reaching more people than the magazine, and therefore, is your magazine more esoteric? Is your website more pedestrian? Or is the multimedia aspect of the web making it your primary vehicle for communication?