•Covering the U.S. Latino Community•

• Syllabus • Fall 2009 •



Meeting Time: TTH 9:30-11 a.m.

Meeting Place: CMA 3.108

This class is both an upper division undergraduate class and a graduate level class.

J349T Unique #07545

J395 (graduate level) Unique #07545

MAS 374 Unique # 36185

Instructor: Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, Ph.D.

Email: mrivas@austin.utexas.edu

Office hours: Tuesdays, 2-4, and by appointment

Office: CMA 5.122

Teaching Assistant: Sebastian Valenzuela,

Email: sebastianvalenzuela@mail.utexas.edu

Office hours: Tuesdays, 1:30-3:30, and by appointment

Office: CMA 5.120

• University of Texas at Austin •

Prerequisites

For 349T: Must be an upper division student; must be journalism major, have scored at least a 45 on the GSP test and have had a score of at least 29 on the Journalism Word Processing Test. This class meets with J395.

For J395: Must be a graduate student.

Required Texts

Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in the United States by Juan Gonzalez. (New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 2001)

Coursepack will be made available.

Other readings available on Blackboard.

Required Newspapers

Daily, including Sunday, The Austin American-Statesman.

Five days a week, the Daily Texan.

Suggested Newspapers

The New York Times, Sunday.

Course Description

In a democracy, the press plays a vital role, that of informing citizens of issues so that they may make informed decisions on issues of importance.

In this class, we’ll explore the deeper role of the press, that of representing society to itself. In the 1969 Kerner Commission Report, the nation’s news media were taken to task for seeing the nation through “white men’s eyes.” The news media were neither reporting on the challenges and problems confronting the nation’s black population to the general society, nor were the mainstream media telling blacks about their own world.

Today, there have been vast improvements. But much improvement can still be made, in particular to the area of reporting underrepresented groups. This class will focus on Latinos as that underrepresented group.

In this class, you’ll be expected to challenge current thinking and to adopt a more sophisticated and nuanced view of today’s Latino community. You’ll see how a standard event story – say the Diez y Seis de Septiembre parade – can be developed into a story that sheds light on issues that confront the Latino population.

We’ll look at areas that include politics; education; organizations; immigration; and culture.

There will be lots of reading and lots of brainstorming, thinking of ways to incorporate more complicated perspectives into those everyday stories. Where we can, we will invite guest speakers, journalists as well as other experts, to share their insights.

On a daily basis, we will apply readings from that day’s news. I welcome suggestions from you on topics of discussion from the day’s news: in previous semesters, entire classes have been devoted to student topics of interest – makes for a far more dynamic and interesting environment for all of us.

We’ll use a weekly schedule as a guide. But please know that I reserve the right to make changes in the schedule in order to make full use of every opportunity to make this course more useful to you. It is likely that the schedule will be revised a few times as we go along.

Course Objective

The immediate goal is for you to learn to cover U.S. Latinos in a more comprehensive and intelligent way. But there is a longer-term objective as well: for you to walk away with a sophisticated arsenal to cover any group and to become a more critical reader of news about any group, in particular under-represented groups, whether they by Native Americans, Muslims, Gays/Lesbians, African Americans, Asian Americans, etc.

This does not ensure that any of those groups will love you. That is not a goal. We will seek to present news in a fair and balanced way, with historical context and a sense of justice.

Attendance

You’ll be treated in this class as the professional you aspire to be. Please treat this class as you would a job. One part of being a professional is being in place promptly – prepared to discuss. A sign-in sheet will be circulated at the beginning of class. It is your responsibility to make sure that you are counted as present. If you are not in place by the beginning of class, you risk being counted as absent.

Of course there may be times when you must miss class, either because of illness or an emergency. You are expected to notify both your professor and your TA before class, via e-mail. For each missed class, you are expected to write a 3-page summary on that day’s readings and give your TA both a hard copy and an electronic copy by the next course period. If you are unable to be in class and contributing, you should drop the class. After three absences, 5 points will be deducted from your final grade. Three more absences, 5 more points, etc.

Grading sheets for assignments

For each assignment, there will be a grading sheet posted in Blackboard, which will include all the details of the assignment. You can use it as a guide for the assignment.

Format

When you do turn in assignments, please write them in 12-point type, double-spaced.

Make sure that any of your assignments are slugged correctly, on your flash drive and hard drive, as well as on your hard copy. This will make it easier to find your story if/when we need an extra copy.

For your final assignment, a feature essay or story about an Austin Latino issue, please make sure to have, at the top of your paper, a BUDGET LINE about your story, and a copy of one piece of art (a photocopy is fine, or a print-out of a graph, etc.)

Budget Lines

OK, I’m a nag about this. But it’s a crucial part of working in a newsroom: budget lines are crucial to a smooth newsroom operation. The slug, or story name, should be descriptive enough that it can be identified with your story. That slug is what you “save as” your story. So that if I get a copy that says YOURLASTNAME_HispanicImmigrants. I will understand immediately who wrote it and what it’s about.

The budget line should also include a description of your story, your name, and the length. Without this information, you couldn’t put out a daily newspaper, or a nightly newscast.

Your budget line, which you put at the top of your assignment should look like this:

YOURLASTNAME_DESCRIPTIVENAMEOFSTORY-- This part is a description of your story, UP TO 3 SENTENCES. YOURNAME. Length:XXX words.

You are required to submit your story both electronically to your TA, as well as on hard copy. We need to make sure you truly understand how to “slug” a story.

Reading Summaries

For every reading, you will be expected to turn in a 250 to 300-word summary due the day of the reading. The best way of doing this is to summarize the reading and to answer one of the discussion questions that we will give you in advance. Combined, the reading summaries will be 10 percent of your grade. Bring the reading summary to class and then hand it to Sebastian.

Book Review

You will choose a book that is related to the contents of the class and will write a review of it. To help you in this assignment, we will provide you with examples of good book reviews (you can also check the Sunday edition of the NYT for further examples) but, in a nutshell, a good book review tells not only what a book is about, but also how successful it is at what it is trying to do. In other words, you write about the “what” and the “so what” question. You can check with us for possible titles.

Final Research Paper

Your Austin Latino issue final paper may be either a long journalistic story or a research essay. You will be given a list of possible ideas, but you may also choose your own. You are required to get prior approval of your idea from me. This paper should be around 10 pages long. In most cases, you are expected to have done some library, or similar research, reading books or journal articles, in addition to, in most cases, news stories about your topic. You’ll very likely find that writing a good outline before you begin writing will be a tremendous help.

Oral Presentations

You will be required to make an oral presentation of your Latino issue as the end of the class. And you will all grade one another. You will be required to provide me and Sebastian with your PowerPoint presentation the day before you are scheduled to present so that I can post it to Blackboard. You should also submit to me one hard copy of three articles (newspaper, journal, magazine, or Internet is OK) about your issue – from three different sources that you used for your presentation..

Other Assignment Requirements

Keep a copy of your work You must retain one copy of your assignments for own files. Not that it happens often, but there is always the danger of your instructors losing a story. For your own safety, keep a copy of your work.

Contact Information

You are required to include the names, telephone numbers, mailing addresses, and (if they have one) email addressees for each person you interviewed for your story, whether or not you quote him or her.

If you do interview someone, you will be sending him/her copies of your stories, either by mail or via email. You’ll find that you will write differently if you know that your words will be read by people you’ve interviewed.

If you have interviewed someone, and you have not included their contact information, 25 points will be deducted from your grade, per day, until the information is provided.

Late Papers

Assignments are generally due at the beginning of class. When you don't make the deadline, you lose 25 points automatically. Twenty-five more points will be deducted for each day after the due date. The only exception is if either I have agreed – beforehand -- to extend your deadline. And those extensions are only for very good reasons.

So what happens if you can’t get all the questions answered in time to turn in your assignment? Happens all the time in the real world. We will learn to write around the missing detail, or, if it’s absolutely crucial to the assignment, to let the reader know we don’t have all the answers. Speculation and guessing are lame ways – and completely unacceptable in journalism -- of getting around the time crunch problems and we will not indulge them.

Production

This semester we’re working with KAKW, the local Univisión station, to produce some content. This is optional for all of you. If you want to try it, though, we’ll give you a crash course in putting together a television story and we’ll be working closely with our Univisión friends. Details are developing.

Bonus Points

The University offers a wealth of riches of various kinds, including speakers and events that will enhance your understanding of the world. To encourage you to take full advantage of those opportunities, you will be allowed to get credit for some. For select events, available to all students, you may attend one of these events and write a 3-page summary of it, for five bonus points to the assignment of your choice. You will turn in these summaries to your TA. I welcome ideas for some of these bonus events.

Grading

Assignment #1 REAX Paper—

Sonia Sotomayor – how was her nomination

covered? 10 points

Assignment #2 Book Review 10 points

Assignment #3 Book Review rewrite 15 points

Assignment #4 Austin Latino story proposal 5 points

Assignment #5 Austin Latino story 15 points

Assignment #6 Austin Latino story rewrite/production 20 points

Assignment #7 Oral Presentation on Austin Latino story 10 points

Assignment #8 Reading Summaries 10 points

Participation 5 points

Total 100 percent

We’ll be using the plus/minus grading system for the final grade.

Honesty

Whether you’re a journalist, or a school teacher, or an accountant, honesty is crucial. It must be clear that we followed standard ethical procedures in using our work. That means that you do your own interviews, use your own notes, write your own prose, attribute information to the right source, stick to the facts you’ve gathered. If you tried unsuccessfully to reach a source, you should say 17 telephone calls were placed and messages left on an answering machine, but no calls were returned.

Some of you aren’t journalists, but the basics of journalism will serve you well, in this class and beyond. For instance, journalists are trained to read a lot of background material and then synthesize it. But there is a difference between using some else’s work as background in your story and plagiarizing.

There is very rarely a reason to quote from another news outlet, as long as you are able to get the information for yourself. In instances where a news outlet has exclusive information, that is, that the outlet got that information before anyone else and/or that it is impossible to get it for yourself, you are justified inciting that news outlet. It is considered professional courtesy on the one hand, and a cover-your-behind procedure on the other.

It is not ever appropriate to cut and paste text from the Web or any other source for any assignment and present it as your own work. It is appropriate and essential to read information for your own background, in researching a topic, off the Web, in any magazine, newspaper, book, or in a broadcast. However, special care must always be taken that the wording is your own, that the work is yours.

Fabricating material is not appropriate – unless it’s very clear that you’re making this stuff up. (Read John Kelso or another humor writer sometime.)

If we find that you have plagiarized or fabricated your work, you will receive an automatic F for the class and the possible expulsion and a formal complaint in your permanent file. There are procedures in place at UT for the expulsion of serial plagiarizers.

If you have any doubts about what’s right or wrong, please contact me – I’m an email away. There is always someone you can turn to if you have any doubts or qualms whatsoever.

Enough already!

This class will move fast and you’ll have a chance to really grow quickly. It will also be fun. Sebastian and I look forward to making this semester as rich and enjoyable as possible. And we look forward to getting to know you better.

8/27/2009

Covering the U.S. Latino Community – Fall 2009

Grading Sheet · Analysis of Press Coverage of Sotomayor’s Nomination

You will conduct an analysis of the way the news media covered Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. As you know, she is the first Latina justice –and this aspect was central to most news coverage of her confirmation process. The idea of this assignment is to get you to understand the differences in the way news outlets operate and cover issues related to race/ethnicity, gender, minorities, etc. In other words, I want you to think critically about the information that circulated in the media about this issue. For instance, a Conservative blog or news network (think Fox) will have covered her confirmation in a different way than a Hispanic news magazine. What are these differences?

So how do you write a REAX paper? As it name implies, you need to compare the reactions of different media to her appointment: What assumptions were made? Can you find any inconsistencies and/or disagreements? What about factual errors? What role did race/ethnicity played in the coverage? What are the merits of the arguments and claims presented? What sources are used and cited? What motivations you see behind the cited sources? – These are just some examples, you do not necessarily need to answer all these questions!

You will have to choose five different news sources (all of them are available online): a Conservative blog, a Latino blog, a mainstream news source, a Hispanic magazine and a TV or radio commentator. Our TA, Sebastián, will give you a tutorial in class of how to find these sources. Ideally, you will browse and read several news stories and/or blog entries from each source before writing your analysis.

For each news source you choose, you will write one page, 1-inch margin, double spaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman font describing the coverage it gave to Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation process and appointment. In total, you should turn in 5 pages. Of course, include the name of the news source, with the URL link (for example, The New York Times - www.nytimes.com) at the top of each page.