Localizing News for School Newspaper

Kim Warren
Salina South High School
Salina, Kansas

Overview and rationale
This plan is part of an Introduction to Journalism unit that addresses news judgment and finding story ideas. The activities can be used with small groups or with individual students. Students could also use magazines, the internet, CNN or a news broadcast. Students can use their generated ideas to go ahead and write stories or put the ideas in a future book for the newspaper staff.

Goals for Understanding

• Students will be able to identify and recognize news elements.
• Students will read newspaper stories as well as headlines and subheads, looking for news elements.
• Students will be able to localize stories for publication in the school’s newspaper or news magazine.

Resources/Materials

• Handout-Localizing News (teacher will need to create)
• Newspapers for everyone

Overviews and timelines

• Activity 1
  • Review news elements.
  • Put the students in groups of three or four.
  • Students cut out one story per person that could be localized.
  • Each student read the story out loud (unless it’s terribly long) to the rest of the group.
  • Fill out Part A of the handout. (One handout for each story.)

• Activity 2
  • Using Part B of the handout, localize the story for the school newspaper.

• Activity 3 (optional)
  • Each student writes a story from the ideas or save the ideas and use them later when you have went over feature or news writing.