Continuing Education

USC / New York Times Knowledge Network

An online partnership to educate high school journalists

USC : New York Times Knowledge Network

The New York Times Knowledge Network and the University of Southern California joined forces to establish and offer a new online continuing education program. As part of the program, the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership & Policy offered courses in journalism and public relations beginning in October 2011. Led by Mark Latonero, CCLP’s former director of research and instruction, courses were taught by CCLP instructors with journalists from The New York Times.

A series of six courses in journalism for high school students were offered beginning in October 2011. Students enrolled in any of the two week courses taught by Latonero and Larry Wilson, an award-winning journalist, editor and highly rated USC Annenberg lecturer, with participation by journalists from The New York Times.

For more information on the classes offered for high school journalists, click on any of the links below:

Who, What, When, Where, How & Why? Introduction to Journalism for High School Students

October 10 – 21, 2011
Journalism at its simplest is what’s new, and therefore news, on a daily basis. High school students of today, accustomed to social networking sites, may not think of the information there as journalism — but much of it actually is. The same tips and rules about how to be a good journalist apply, whether stories and pictures are seen on paper or a phone screen. We’ll review the history of American journalism from Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac” through content created just for the iPad. Throughout, the core values of fact finding and fact checking remain the same. We’ll finish with the ways that Facebook, Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle change what we know and how we know it.
Lead Instructors: Mark Latonero, Ph.D., Larry Wilson
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How to Start a Blog for High School Students

October 24 – November 4, 2011
A blog originally was a Weblog, a simple personal diary available for viewing to everyone who finds its Internet address. But every writer had to build his own. Then easy-to-use and widely available free templates and rapidly evolving technology allowed the blogger to post not only words and simple pictures but movies taken with hand-held devices, interactive programs that allow your readers to get involved and links to the whole wide world of the Web. What is the place of the blog in a social-networking world? How can a creator build his “brand” so that many people turn to it every day?
Lead Instructors: Mark Latonero, Ph.D., Larry Wilson
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Editing for High School Students

November 28 – December 9, 2011
Every writer — including perhaps especially good and even great writers — needs editing, and an editor. Whether it’s help with errors of fact or of grammar and usage or matters of tone and tense, having a sympathetically critical eye on your writing can be the best thing for it. We’ll learn both how to be edited — how to take criticism to heart to make our writing better — and how to become an editor ourselves to help bring out the best in other writers’ work, using the Associated Press Stylebook and other common journalistic tools for editors.
Lead Instructors: Mark Latonero, Ph.D., Larry Wilson
Register for class

Running a Community Blog for High School Students

November 7 – 19, 2011
Nothing in the last decade of personal journalism has changed the world, for everyone connected to the Internet, like special-interest blogging. Some of the communities are artistic — electric guitar players chatting about their craft. Many big-time blogs are sports-related. But in an era in which small community weeklies are having a hard time surviving economically, community-based blogs, including blogs covering hundreds of neighborhoods throughout Los Angeles County, run by just one or two people, are providing much-needed information to people who really need it. Journalists call this kind of blogging “local-local-local” — beyond a regional presence, beyond coverage of a city, right down to your backyard. We’ll learn from the most successful examples — including the Altadena bloggers who kept the community informed in real time when the Station Fire threatened thousands of homes — how best to build community, block by block.
Lead Instructors: Mark Latonero, Ph.D., Larry Wilson
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Don’t Bury the Lede – Feature Writing for High School Students

January 9 – 20, 2011
A feature is really any story that isn’t breaking news. The best way to hook your reader into staying with it is to write a great “lede,” or introductory sentence and paragraph. One of the most famous true-crime books of recent years came out of the lede Miami police-beat reporter Edna Buchanan wrote in a newspaper story: “The corpse had a familiar face.” Buchanan spent so much time on her beat that she knew many of the people who cops would find murdered. But we don’t have to be on the crime beat to learn to write compelling features. Features are about people, people you’d like to know. We’ll show you the way to tell their stories in a compelling way.
Lead Instructors: Mark Latonero, Ph.D., Larry Wilson
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Creating Video for the Web for High School Students

January 23 – February 3, 2012
Thanks to the technology in modern computers and smart phones, many of us have made short movies featuring friends or sporting events (or cats). But we wouldn’t probably consider the results professional journalism. We’ll learn how adding simple titles and soundtracks and tightening the viewers’ experience by editing video can make what might be amusing or interesting for a few seconds become a Web video that everyone with a laptop wants to see on YouTube — or on news-based Web sites looking for great content.
Lead Instructors: Mark Latonero, Ph.D., Larry Wilson
Register for class