Due: Monday, Feb. 17, 7:00 a.m.

Best Practice: Draft it prior to Friday Discussion Section (Feb. 14th)

Submission: Upload to Canvas

Read this excert of Tim Harrower's textbook Inside Reporting: Harrower excerpt

Your task:

As a journalist, it is your role to gather background information about your story’s subject in order to ask informed questions and write a comprehensive, accurate account.

1. Gather background information on the Cuban Center at IU, enough to give you the necessary context to understand the press conference.

2. Take notes as you view the video press conference. Write down facts and their sources that are important enough to include in your written assignment.

3. Write a compelling lead that focuses on the most newsworthy facts from the information you gathered. Your lead should summarize the most important information and accurately state facts about Mark Cuban’s donation. Although this donation happened in the past, for the sake of this assignment write about the press conference/donation as if it happened yesterday.

4. For the next part of the assignment, you need to identify what type of lead you have written (see samples and types in Harrower excerpt).

5. Finally, it is inevitable that when writing your lead, you will have to leave out some worthwhile information although you would likely use it if you were writing the whole story. List this information in bullet-point style.

6. Type your assignment in a Word document. Format your submission with the following three sections, labels and information:

   • Lead:

   • Type of lead:

   • Other important information:

7. Upload to Canvas

The Press Conference

Rubric: