ASSIGNMENT ONE:
PROVIDE THE INFORMATION BELOW

Name: Coco
Mobile phone: 13269611526
Email: coconut228@hotmail.com

Add photo here:

Personal Web page: I don't have.

Blog address: I don't have.

Survey:

Career goal:

What do you want your job to be in 20 years?
An editor of a magazine for fasion or house decoration or LOHAS life

In 5 years?
Working in that kind of magazine office and grab any chance to learn new things

When you graduate?
2008

Are you interested in a career in journalism?
sort of

How can this course help you reach your goals?
Well, it may not be what exactly what I want, but it can help me accumulate journalism knowledge. Sometimes you cannot just focus on one thing, but need to have grand knowledge.

Goals for this course:

Are you interested in producing for this course:

Podcasts?
Video segments for YouTube?
Newspaper or wire stories?
A Blog?
A regular news broadcast?
I accept all of them above.

Guests:

Would you like guest speakers from any particular professions?
Sure.

Experience:

Please briefly describe any work you have done in the news media.
I haven't have any chance.


How many television packages have you produced at this school? (Please include links if possible)
None. I guess so.

Do you have any production skills necessary to run a news broadcast? Please list.
Maybe I don't have.


News Habits:

Which foreign and Chinese newscasts do you regularly watch?
I don't have TV set in my dorm.

How familiar are you with foreign news broadcasts? Can you watch them at home? Over the Internet?
Not very familiar with them. I can only watch them over the Internet.

Please list some strengths and weaknesses of foreign news broadcasts compared to Chinese broadcasts.
Strengths: good writing skills
Weaknesses: bias (but actually, every country has this problem due to different cutural background.)

What newspapers and news Web sites do you visit regularly?
www.sina.com.cn

Do you read the Washington Post and the New York Times? (Hint: You should)
Sometimes

ASSIGNMENT TWO

Please paste the broadcast script you wrote in class on Sept. 10 based on the news wire report here.
The number of polio cases in Afghanistan has jumped. Health officials attribute the rise to growing violence in the south that has hampered vaccination. They have identified at least 25cases of polio so far this year, compared with 9 in all of 2005. The new cases have been concentrated in five southern provinces. Heavy fighting between insurgents and Afghan and international forces has prevented twice-yearly vaccination programs there. The insurgents have threatened and killed health officials.

ASSIGNMENT THREE
Please paste the Obituary assignment here.
I didn't write an obituary. I make it a birthday party. Here it goes:
I am very glad to attend Coco's birthday party.
I congratulate myself on my good fortune to have been working with Coco and become her good friend.
As the chief editor of our magazine Home, she is very conscientious and creative. She can always find a special topic for each issue to excite our enthusiasm. To discuss editorial work with her, I am continuously surprised by her none-stopping innovation.
I admire her very much. It is not only because of her editorial competence but alse of her philosophy of life.
For her, work is not a work. I know she really love house decoration. In her free time, she likes decorating her house and making it a cosy place for her family. And, she has the aspiration to share her thoughts with other people, so she can work with a will and never feel tired. But I don't mean that she is a workaholic. She keeps a good balance between work and family.
Here, I wish her a healthy body and live happily for ever.


ASSIGNMENT FOUR
Write three pitches that you and some classmates can actually produce with the time and resources available to you.

The audience will be English speaking You Tube viewers. Your pitch should offer them something they cannot see elsewhere. This means slice of life and human interest stories are OK, but try to come up with some hard issue pieces or stories related to breaking news as well. Foreigners love to hear about: The Olympics, counterfeit or dangerous products, the environment and global warming, martial arts, student trends, China's economy, interesting tourist destinations, and anything unusual or surprising. Think about a story you would like to hear about in another country, and try it here.

Also think about the big stories in the world, and look for a Chinese connection. Are there Iraqi students here? Does China have an Islamic insurgency? What do Chinese students think about the US presidential race? Who is in charge at the Palestian Embassy here now that the Palestinians have split amid civil war?

Your pitch should include the names of the people you plan to interview, and the shots you plan to include.

Pitch One:
To interview Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng about:
1. What does she think of the Chinese internet market, as one of the member of board of Myspace China?
2. Why bring Myspace to China?
3. Will it be more inculturalized?
4. ...... and so on

Pitch Two:
To interview the famous Chinese economist Liang Xiaomin about:
1. the tendency of the continuing rising Chinese stock marker
2. exist speculative bubbles in Chinese stock marker?
3. China facing inflation?
4. ...... and so on

Pitch Three:
The role of Migrant Workers in Chongqing (southwest China's biggest industrial and commercial center)
To interview chongqing officials, citizens, and migrant workers about:
1. Migrant workers are unfairly treated?
2. their trouble to get their children into child care centers and schools
3. They can't get medicare?
4. their potential threat to the peace and stability of the society
5. ...... and so on

ASSIGNMENT FIVE Please evaluate the story in terms of fairness and bias, focusing on how the story is sourced.

In other words, go through the story and determine the sources of all the reported facts. Please weigh how credible each source is. Then consider whether the facts she has assembled support the conclusions she draws. Has she assembled a solid foundation of facts, or is leaving out important information or points of view? You should also consider things you know about this situation that are not reported in the story.

If you think she has a bias, please support the claim.

I am going to compile your answers and send them to the writer, so please include any questions you want to ask her.

Please complete this by Saturday evening. I am not looking for length, but quality of ideas. Please dont spend more than an hour on this assignment.

Did this story give you any ideas for your own methods of reporting?

Personally, I think this story is rather fair. It makes me believe that the writer is telling the truth. It has no reason for me to be skeptical about the sources because she gives specific names of organizations, experts and pig raisers. And her assertions seems true to me. I believe that she did interview some people and do a lot of work to draw her conclusions from all her materials and her assertions sound reasonable.
However, after talking to some classmates ( I believe that some of they are better at English than me ), we think that this story is not logical and make us confusing. I suppose that it maybe because it is too long for me, or because of different patterns of thought.
Though I said this story was rather fair and convincing above, I can't help feeling antipathy to one of the sentenses in which a phrase using quotation mark. (And it maintains that it has been "open and transparent" all along.) Can I say it's a bias? Maybe it's only her personal skepticism towards Chinese authority. But my patriotism makes me dislike it.
Besides, I want to say, please forgive us for picking up every possible words to show bias in this story. Better to say it's a conditioned reflex. We are trained to do so. One course of us in last semester was to tell bias towards China in reports of western world. Of course the name of the course is not this, but I think it's the core of that course. So we say "it's biased" as soon as we look at a story reporting China.