Final Project



Drafts due: Week of April 28.
Final versions due: Week of May 5.

(NOTE DEADLINES HAVE CHANGED DUE TO INSTRUCTOR’S MEDICAL LEAVE)

Exact deadline schedule is posted on the wiki.

At the end of the semester you will complete an individual online report using multiple media about an environmental issue or phenomenon in Hong Kong. It will combine text, links, pictures and/or graphics and audio, as appropriate. The written text is not supposed to be too long, the point is to show that you know how to tell a story in an innovative way by combining visuals, text, and audio. Weeks 9-12 will focus on learning and practicing the skills you’ll need to complete this project and publish it on the content management system used for the class website.

Specific requirements:

  • Your final story will be ONE Joomla document, separated into 2-3 sub-pages (depending on the nature and size of the media elements that you are using), using Joomla’s “page continuation” function. (This will be explained in the week 9 class.)
  • Text should NOT EXCEED 800 words, but can be as little as 3-400 if you are relying on strong visual, graphic, and audio elements to tell your story. This is NOT a term paper or newspaper story.
  • Make coherent use of multiple media elements to tell the story you have chosen. That includes photos, audio clips, charts and graphs when appropriate, maps when appropriate, and possibly photo galleries or slideshows. (We will talk more about multiple media vs. multimedia in Week 9)
  • You WILL be evaluated on whether you tell a story clearly and journalistically, in a way that a member of the public (i.e., somebody who is neither your teacher or your relative who is not obsessed with your topic) would actually want to spend time reading/watching/listening. The longest and most complicated story will NOT necessarily get the best grade – less is often more when you are trying to tell a compelling story to a general audience.
  • This website is in English for an English-speaking audience. Assume that you are working for a news organization whose editors and audience cannot read or understand Chinese. Therefore your work must be comprehensible to non-Chinese speakers as well as to people who do not live in Hong Kong.
  • Professional standards of language usage, grammar, punctuation, and spelling apply to your web work in the same way that they apply to your print stories.

Further things to note:

  • This project is DIFFERENT in scope and requirements than the assignments from the last two semesters. WHILE THEY MAKE USEFUL EXAMPMLES, DO NOT COPY THEM EXACTLY.
  • This assignment does NOT include a soundslide. In this semester, we have separated the soundslide assignment from the rest of the HKStories assignent. We will embed the soundslides stories that your teams are making for April 7th into the HKStories website, but you are NOT asked to include a soundslide into your final story.

After posting your final draft on the Hong Kong Stories website, you will be asked to make corrections and changes before the story can be published, within one week of the final draft’s completion.

Examples of coherent use of multiple media by students in previous semesters:

Young Blood Phenomenon by Tia Tian
The Story of Hong Kong’s District Councils by Julia Offen
Hong Kong’s Income Gap, Jonathan Magee
Hong Kong Voter Perspectives by Naomi Reidy and Wu Yunyu.