Hello COMS104 news writing students!

This is a quickly made in-class demo to show the kind of information you should be posting at your new WordPress blogs —  evidence that you really are reading the news and learning from it. The original assignment sheet said to read a week’s news, pick three stories, and write a report including the headline, link, lead paragraph, and a short paragraph saying why you liked the story.

I’m only posting one here as a demo, while showing the class how to turn the original headline into an active link, and how to use the “blockquote” widget on the menu bar to indent quoted material. (Use quote marks, too.)

You may use any WordPress theme that you like, just make it clear what you are quoting and what you are writing in your own words.

“You think of heroin as seedy street slums,
but that’s not at all how it started“

“The night Scott Roth showed up at Spencer Mumpower’s Grandin Village apartment in April 2010, it had been a while since the former schoolmates had seen each other — at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.” http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/damagedone/part2/

This story by Beth Macy is the second installment in a Roanoke Times series that began Sunday about heroin and two young men — one died, the other is in prison. I think Beth does an amazing job of getting to know people in terrible circumstances, and getting them to share their stories — all in hopes of doing some good for other families.

Categories: WordPress lets you “tag” each post with one or more categories. The only one it creates for you is “uncategorized,” but a prominent “Add New Category” link on the dashboard makes it pretty obvious. I’ve created categories for newspapers I read and types of news stories. This story fits in more than one category.

Meanwhile, I hope more of you bought Sunday’s Roanoke Times, because it was full of good stories:
The first installment of the heroin series.
A Labor Day parade story from a city that still celebrates workers.
A column about badly edited grade school history books. (Already corrected once, now they have a fake “Thomas Jefferson quote” popular on Tea Party Web sites.)
And more.