A Belated Welcome with Some Thoughts of a Confessed News Junkie

After a week of conferences and the October break, welcome back to class and blogging.

For this, our second unit, we will be looking more closely at contemporary civic discourse, the media, and the blogosphere. We will be reading more of Harris’s Rewriting as a way of understanding how texts are written in response to other texts. We will be reading daily the The New York Times and collected blogs. All of this work will be reflected in our blog posts and an extended essay in which you each will track the circulation and rewriting of a news story.

I am really am looking forward to this unit. I consider the first unit a foundation for this one in the ways that the first unit had us considering basic ideas of civic literacy and reading and writing on the web. But for me, the real payoff is with this unit.

I will confess at the beginning—and as way of response to some of the same topics I’ve asked you to post about—that I am a bit of a news junkie. Before continuing graduate school, I worked as a reporter at daily newspapers and as a freelance journalist, work that I continue in occasional assignments for Louisville Magazine. I try to keep current with the news. For me, this means reading The New York Times, the Las Vegas newspapers, and the Louisville Courier-Journal. I regularly check Slate and Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. I follow Robert Reich’s blog. I subscribe to Harper’s and Esquire, the two magazines I read most regularly. I check in with local bloggers the Las Vegas Gleaner and the ‘Ville Voice here in Louisville. I listen to NPR in the morning and go to bed with the BBC. All of that is just for general news. Then there are the hobby and special interest sites—pitchfork for music, The Ring and fightnews to keep up with boxing, and Boing Boing for all kinds of other things. Plus, I have my academic work and interests to keep up on through various web sites and journal subscriptions.

Why do I keep up with all of this?

We talked some in class about the idea of social capital. I am not employing a strict sociological definition of the concept here, but I think it is useful as a way of considering what keeping up with the news allows us to do. It might allow us more informed and active participation in our communities. It might allow us to engage in a conversation with somebody, to establish relationships. It might allow us to make unexpected connections and to participate more meaningfully in the greater conversations of the nation and the world. I am hopeful, but we shall see.

Part of my motivation for this unit is to encourage the types of civic literacy habits—as ways of reading and writing and talking and rewriting—that I find most rewarding in my professional and personal life. I have tried to design this unit and course to be as widely applicable as possible; because we may have different majors and interests, but we share some form of citizenship or residency. Beyond that, I have designed this unit by considering the literacy skills I consider most valuable and the type of course that I would have preferred to take.