Upcoming highlights for the end of November

With a mere two weeks left in the term until finals, two major events are scheduled in the J-School the last week of November.

Documentary photojournalist Rania Matar will arrive on campus Monday afternoon. She is slated to talk to students in classes and make a presentation of her work at 7 p.m., Tuesday, November 27 in Studio D, CAS Building. She has spent much of her career covering the Middle East and especially the impact of the violence on women in the region. For more on Matar, visit her website at www.raniamater.com.

On Wednesday, November 28, approximately 80 students, mostly freshmen and sophomores currently taking the JRN 108 Introduction to Mass Media course, will participate in a live blog on The Detroit News web site (www.detnews.com) during the CNN/YouTube Republican Presidential Primary Debate, from 8-10 p.m.

A dozen students will be the bloggers, posting information, commentary and analysis. Multimedia content will be provided by other student teams as the debate unfolds. The goal is to keep a continuous flow of text, images and video clips posting to the blog page that The Detroit News has built specifically to house the student output during the debate. The News’ own political bloggers will also post to the web site. It will be dueling bloggers with the students providing a unique college perspective.

Students will be using electronic “clickers” to instantly capture their reactions to the debate. The “Clicker Response Team” of 60 or more students will watch the debate and be interrupted periodically to answer questions on their impressions.

“The team assigned to generating those questions will take the results of this instant focus-group response and use IM (Instant Messaging) to send the results to our live bloggers, so they can use the results in their postings,” says MSU Instructor Bonnie Bucqueroux who developed the event on the MSU side with assistance from MSU doctoral student Robin Blom.

Another student team will track the amount of airtime each of the eight candidates receives. Another team will monitor how often the candidates mention specific issues or the names of their rivals. The “truth squad” group will try to check facts in real time, and the video crew will solicit student comments and then post them on YouTube for immediate inclusion in the live blogs.

This is a prelude to the 2008 Presidential election. More and more of political activity is moving online as politicians and their handlers have discovered, it’s a great way to capture a new generation of voters in one of the hottest arenas out there—YouTube. Watch it and see!