No current events quiz this week

We will skip the current events quiz this week. Spend the extra time crafting your brilliant news story. We'll talk a little about the week's events on Friday.

BTW, that sample news story is posted online. It's in Unit 2, titled "Sample news story." Make sure the story you turn in Friday looks just like that, including the final paragraph.

Unemployment declines slightly

This will be useful for all of you as you work on your stories. It will probably also be on the quiz Friday.

A couple other possibilities for the quiz can be found here and here.

Sorry, but I'm a sucker for any story that presents humans in a place other than at the top of the food chain.

Montana and Wendell came up with a handy sheet that has the enrollment for all state colleges for the last 10 years. I made extra copies. Make sure you ask for one on Friday if I forget.

Montana, if you haven't called Tech yet I'm sure its at the top of your list. Once you have Tech's preliminary numbers you can compare them to the FVCC numbers provided a few posts down, and then we'll know how big a story you have. (Actually, now that I look at those FVCC numbers from Fall 2009 and this semester I can see that they are different than the number you received today, so we'll need to figure out why.)

Update, go here for a story on Tech enrollment.

No quiz Friday

Sorry for the disappointment, but we will skip the current events quiz this Friday in order to spend the entire class working on story assignments. See you in the morning.

When a Fringe Figure Becomes News

Take a look at this interesting conversation about the media coverage of the Koran-burning controversy. Post a comment by 8 p.m. Friday for a grade. There may be a question on your quiz as well.

Current events

We talked about three stories that are pretty certain CE quiz questions:

— Obama announces a new stimulus proposal

— Obama says he won't support a compromise to allow the Bush tax cuts on families with incomes of more than $250,000 to continue (notice I used "more than" rather than "over," its an AP style thing)

— The general leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan says the Koran-burning event in Florida endangers the troops

You'll find plenty of coverage on these stories at www.nytimes.com

You'll find a local story with a good shot at making the cut here:

Judge nixes relocating trial for boat crash.

We spent a lot of time talking about this story when it happened a year ago. Scroll down to posts from the fall 2009 for more background if you're interested.

See you Friday.

FVCC enrollment up again

I received this e-mail from Faith Hodges, FVCC executive director of enrollment planning, Tuesday morning.

Good Tuesday Morning. Just a quick message with the latest enrollment numbers. This morning’s counts are as follows:

FTE: 1857.6 (on the 2nd day of Fall 2009, FTE was 1754.53; at 3rd week it was 1794.7 and the final FTE was 1820.40). Today’s FTE represents a 5.9% increase over the FTE on this day last fall.

Headcount: 2433 (on 2nd day of Fall 2009, headcount was 2347 and at 3rd week it was 2501). Today’s headcount represents a 3.7% increase over the headcount on this day last fall.

FYI, FTE stands for full-time equivalent. Two part-time students may count as one FTE. Extra credit goes to the person who correctly answers this question:

What is significant about the FVCC enrollment numbers from Fall 2009?