J 201: Introduction to Mass Communication: Essay 1 story options

Below are the stories, outlets and sample articles selected for Essay 1. You will see there are 4 story options: choose one of them for your essay. For each story option, there are two outlets; it is these outlets’ coverage of the story that you will be analyzing and comparing. For each outlet, there are links to two stories. These stories are NOT the sum of the outlets’ coverage. (One of your first tasks will be research to collect the complete set of each outlet’s coverage so you can analyze it.)

NOTE: This is not the full assignment description. Be sure to see the full description at: http://j201.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html

Another note: For convenience, these links are—of course—to the online version of the respective articles. You may want to consider the papers’ coverage more broadly: especially, it may be useful to look at physical papers to see where stories appeared, how they were different, etc. (Some papers have convenient web displays of exactly what is in the print paper; others do not.) We will talk more about this next week.

Finally, since each of these stories is very recent, coverage will continue to unfold over coming weeks. You are not responsible for analyzing coverage up to the due date of the assignment. Instead, it is reasonable for you to bound your analysis: set a date after which you will no longer collect stories. A date during this coming week, such as 12:00am on Tuesday the 24^th, would be reasonable. Mention the bounds of your analysis in your essay.

Story #1: The House of Representatives passes a bill tying government funding to health care law

(This happened just yesterday, Friday the 20^th, so additional coverage will be coming soon.)

Outlet 1: The Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323308504579087032642057334.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

Outlet 2: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/us/politics/house-spending-bill.html?hpw&_r=0

Story #2: Mass shooting of 13 at a Chicago park

Outlet 1: The Chicago Tribune

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-multiple-victims-weapon-20130921,0,1742025.story

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0922-20130922,0,1133577.column

Outlet 2: The Chicago Sun-Times

http://www.suntimes.com/22682895-761/who-does-that-victim-asks-of-gunman-who-opened-fire-on-park-filled-with-kids.html