Identify as informational, topical, or profile...
1. Barton Springs: A history of Barton Springs Pool and why people love it
2. Let's Get Physical: A summer guide to staying in shape as you wait for football season to start again
3. Riding the Wave: Google's newest social networking app that has people talking
Identify the nut graph and which specific sentences point to the story's relevance.
Ian Restil, a 15-year-old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. "I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic [book] number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy, and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!"
Over and over again, the boy, who is wearing a frayed Cal Ripken Jr. t-shirt, is shouting his demands. Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening--and trying ever so delicately to oblige.
"Excuse me, sir," one of the suits says, tentatively, to the pimply teenager. "Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you. Then, you can buy the [comic] book, and then, when you're of more, say, appropriate age, you can buy the car and pornographic magazines on your own."
It's pretty amazing that a 15-year-old could get a big-time software firm to grovel like that. What's more amazing, though, is how Ian got Jukt's attention--by breaking into its databases. In March, Restil--whose nom de plume is "Big Bad Bionic Boy"--used a computer at his high school library to hack into Jukt. Once he got past the company's online security system, he posted every employee's salary on the company's website alongside more than a dozen pictures of naked women, each with the caption: "the big bad boy has been here baby." After weeks of trying futilely to figure out how Ian cracked the security program, Jukt's engineers gave up. That's when the company came to Ian's Bethesda, Maryland, home--to hire him.
And Ian, clever boy that he is, had been expecting them. "The principal told us to hire a defense lawyer fast, because Ian was in deep trouble," says his mother, Jamie Restil. "Ian laughed and told us to get an agent. Our boy was definitely right." Ian says he knew that Jukt would determine it was cheaper to hire him—and pay him to fix their database--than it would be to have engineers do it. And he knew this because the same thing had happened to more than a dozen online friends.
The unit test will also cover the following:
Layout analysis (how a designer uses elements to guide a reader's eye, how it relates to story content or evokes a mood or feeling)
Nut Graph - Be able to define, identify
Type of Lead - Be able to identify narrative, descriptive, startling statement, twist, direct quote, compare/contrast
Interview quotes - Be able to tell which should be direct quotes, and which should be paraphrased/used as background transition
Explain the purposes of transitions.
Identify poor forms in feature writing (first person, "when asked," cliches, "imagine this"-type leads)
Stephen Glass (know the basics of the movie and why this was such a breakthrough in online journalism)
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