Tracking Impact Assignment
21st Century Media
Goal: To learn the power of journalism to have impact on society and history, and to
learn that impact is not always clear-cut or immediate.
Deadline: 1 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010
Length: 800-1,000 words, plus a brief oral presentation of what you found.
How to turn in: E-mail with an attached Word file. Title the file “YourName Tracking.”
What to do: We will talk this quarter a lot about the outside forces that change and
shape journalism. You will have explored some of that in the earlier “Time Machine”
assignment. Journalism also has great power to change the world around it, sometimes
for better, sometimes for worse.
You have heard in class some examples of journalism’s or journalists’ impact on
circumstances. Through your research on this assignment you and your classmates will
explore other examples and teach each other about them.
You will find and research one example of how a journalist or a news outlet had impact
in specific and detailed ways. The impact may be positive or negative, local or national.
Your example may be related to any part of the media: conglomeration and ownership,
breaking news, investigative reporting or visual storytelling. Your example must
illustrate specific, identifiable, quantifiable impact. It cannot be a vague assertion that
journalism had impact.
The journalistic event and its impact must have occurred between 1960 and today.
Some questions you should consider:
1.
2.
3.
4.
What caused the journalist or news company to do what it did?
Did the journalist risk anything by doing what it did?
Was the impact immediately apparent, or was it delayed?
Would things have changed anyway, even if the journalistic event/coverage had
not occurred?
5. Was the impact clearly positive, clearly negative, or mixed?
6. Was the impact the result of a single act by a journalist or media outlet? Or did
the act spur others to do similar things, and the cumulative effect caused the
impact?
7. Were journalists praised or damned for doing this?
8. Did the journalists act intending to make an impact, or was the impact accidental
or unintended?
Organization:
This should be an essay that outlines in third-person narrative the circumstances of
the time, the journalistic event, and the outcome of that event.
Research Resources:
To do this assignment well, you will need to conduct library research as well as finding
information online. Many journalism textbooks contain numerous stories of journalism’s
impact. As with the Time Machine project, you can do worse than start with The Press
and America by Emery and Emery, but there are others. Once you gain some basic
knowledge about the event, you can dive deeper into research through books and
articles about specific debates that took place surrounding the event to determine why
it was praised and why it was castigated and by whom. The Northwestern library’s Web
site has an excellent database of journals about history and journalism. Type in a few
relevant keywords, and you can likely find many helpful articles. You must use at least
three different sources. No more than two of those may be on the Internet. At least one
of the sources should be primary material – in other words, an original example of the
journalism coverage that had impact.
Expectations:
1.
2.
3.
4.
You will thoroughly research the event (citations will be evidence of this)
You will be historically accurate
You will write clearly and edit carefully
You will cite all references (footnotes or endnotes are fine)
Doing an excellent job on all four elements will earn you an A, three a B, two a C,
and one a D. Failure to deliver the assignment by the deadline, Oct. 28, 2010, will
earn you an F.
You should be prepared to discuss your findings in your discussion section on Oct.
28, 2010.