Let's Get It Started My Students

Alright Journalism students, it's time to start our blogs.

Guidelines are simple: every week you must blog about a topic.  If you have that ailment known as Writer's Block, I will give you a prompt to help you get started.

PART I:
For your first blog, I would like you to give me a summary of everything you have soaked up that we have discussed in class.  What have your learned about Journalism?  Give me some jargon (special wording journalists should know), tell me the important aspects to a story, what makes a strong lead, and so much more you can hopefully tell me.

PART II:  Get your blog going.  Here's mine:
 The autobiography Decoded by Jay - Z is one of my favorite reads of all time.  Jay - Z takes you behind the scenes of his childhood and into the start up of his hip hop fame all the while placing images and lyrics with footnotes throughout the book.  What I love most is what Jay-Z says about writing and the power of adding layers to your work.  To me, this is the beauty and power of strong lyrics.  It's when the artist says one thing, but there can be three different meanings going on, so listeners can hear the lyrics on different levels.  To me, this is art.

Here are some great quotes from Jay-Z's autobiography:

Decoded Quotes

Decoded by Jay-Z

“We change people through conversation, not through censorship.”

“A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.” 

“Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow.” 

“I believe you can speak things into existence.” 

“Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.”

“Hip-hop has always been controversial, and for good reason. When you watch a children's show and they've got a muppet rapping about the alphabet, it's cool, but it's not really hip-hop. The music is meant to be provocative - which doesn't mean it's necessarily obnoxious, but it is (mostly) confrontational, and more than that, it's dense with multiple meanings. Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don't necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head. You can enjoy a song that knocks in the club or has witty punch lines the first time you hear it. But great rap retains mystery. It leaves shit rattling around in your head that won't make sense till the fifth or sixth time through. It challenges you.

Which is the other reason hip-hop is controversial: People don't bother trying to get it. The problem isn't in the rap or the rapper or the culture. The problem is that so many people don't even know how to listen to the music.”

“This is why we shouldn't be afraid. There are two possibilities: One is that there's more to life than the physical life, that our souls "will find an even higher place to dwell" when this life is over. If that's true, there's no reason to fear failure or death. The other possibility is that this life is all there is. And if that's true, then we have to really live it - we have to take it for everything it has and "die enormous" instead of "living dormant," as I said way back on "Can I Live." Either way, fear is a waste of time.”

“Hip-hop is a perfect mix between poetry and boxing.” 

“[T]he truth is you don't need some external demon to take control of you to turn you into a raging, money-obsessed sociopath, you only need to let loose the demons you already have inside of you.” 

“I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.”