This course covers the preparation of copy for publication across media platforms, with an emphasis on careful writing, accuracy and presentation. Writing proficiency is required for a passing grade in this W- designated course. A student who does not write with the skill normally required of an upper-division student in this discipline will not earn a passing grade, no matter how well the student performs in other areas of the course.

In this class, you will study and learn the art of connecting language and visuals with shared meaning in a news context. By the end of the course, you should have the skills necessary to land entry-level professional editing jobs and you should have gained a conceptual foundation that will serve you well in higher editing positions. You will produce multimedia projects for WVUA23.

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By the end of the semester, students should be able to:

•   Edit news copy effectively for grammar, spelling and style. 

•   Edit and craft news copy for language efficiency, relevance, story organization, logic and accuracy. 

•   Understand the responsibility editors have to their audiences and communities. 

•   Be familiar with legal and ethical issues relevant to editing. 

•   Understand how the issues and context of editing are constantly changing in a digital and social media age. 

•   Demonstrate technical skills for packaging news information, including: headline writing, linking, tease and caption writing; photo selection and cropping; basic page design; and packaging news for digital media (editing for website optimization, editing for continuous publication, packaging news for online slideshows, SEO and social media cards). 


•   Write thoughtful analyses of news copy, layouts, design, headlines and other elements, synthesizing what we’re learning and applying it to real-life examples of journalism in the Digital Media Center at WVUA23.

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I took JCM 323 in the Spring Semester of 2019. For the lab component of this course, we were expected to use the broadcast script used for the WVUA 10pm news from the previous evening, and transform it into an article suitable for the online website. Below you can view the scripts I used to write my online articles.