How much is a fact worth?

I'm not teaching introductory news writing this semester, but I will be this summer and next fall. One of my rules for this class is that students who make factual errors in a story automatically receive an F (50 percent credit). I used to give an automatic zero, but I changed my policy a couple of years ago. Some students complain about the automatic F policy. Over the years, however, I've noticed that the good students learn a lot from their mistakes. I've had more than a few students who commented on this at evaluation time. The comments usually read something like this: I was angry when I got an F on my paper for misspelling a name, but I learned never to do that again!

Introductory news writing is a 200-level class at UNC, which means it's sophomore level. When I teach 300- and 400-level classes, I use a different grading policy. I take off one letter grade for each factual error. Maybe I should change this policy so all classes are equal. Any suggestions?

Speaking of mistakes, if you haven't seen Regret the Error yet, you have to check it out. I think my students would get a kick out of it. I do worry about showing students sites like these for the following reason: Students might think that if major news organizations make terrible mistakes, why should we get punished? After all, we are just students. I guess my answer is that if you get punished now, in school, where only a grade is at stake, you are less likely to make a big mistake later that might cost you your job.

Our experiment begins

My Advanced News & Feature Writing students and I are working with the local newspaper, the Greeley Tribune, to create a Web magazine that will be part of the Trib's site. I'm very excited. My students are feeling a bit like guinea pigs, but that's understandable. Although my classes have created Web pages in the past, this is the first time I've worked with an outside entity to go online. It looks promising so far. Most of my students have taken the first step into the multimedia world by creating their own blogs.

The class is the capstone course for all the news-editorial students in our program, which means students must show off what they've learned in their time as JMC majors. I require them to cover beats. A beat is a fancy word for a topic that a reporter covers on a regular basis, like education or business or high school sports. Students choose their own beats and write three major articles during the semester. Each student's blog is based on his or her beat. Check out these blogs by clicking on the links at right.

My hope is that students update their blogs twice a week to let readers know what they're working on or what events are happening on their beats. The next step is to work with Jessie Williams, the Tribune's multimedia editor, to create the Web page. Once that is done, we can upload students' stories, photos and other work. I'm hoping we can put together some slide shows, and Williams said she might even teach us about podcasts and videography. This is new territory for me, but Williams has the talent to help us do a great job, as you can see from the Tribune's Web site. See Williams' bio.

Once the page is up, I'm hoping we can link to the students' blogs -- as well as mine. That way, site visitors can find out not only who produced the stories but how and why they produced them in the way they did.