George Mason University From Life in Prison to Out on Parole Article Analysis

In this age of news aggregators (GoogleNews, Flipboard, etc.) and news blogs (Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, etc.), it is important that students learn how to best locate high-quality reporting that relies on original content generated by reporters working in the places and with the people they describe.

Given that connecting new knowledge to the outside world helps with knowledge acquisition and retention, students are encouraged to regularly post articles to the that meets all of the following four central criteria:

• Include a named author – this promotes accountability and often filters out “break news” over in-depth reporting.
• Feature reporting, not editorial analysis. Be on alert for indications that a selection may be an “op-ed” or “editorial” or “opinion” or “column.” These may be good articles to read, and may even be directly relevant to our course themes, but they are not a good fit for this assignment.
• Be “field-filed,” meaning it was written in the city/county it is describing (as indicated in the dateline, usually right at the beginning of the article or on a sidebar). An article written in New York or Los Angeles about an election of a Black official in Colorado, for example, is not field-filed. An article filed from Tijuana, Mexico reporting on an immigrant detention center at the border might work if its substance is related to the experience of immigrants at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in San Diego.
• Relate in its substance to the topic of this course – Race, Ethnicity, & Politics.

As a start (but certainly not an exhaustive list), these are places that routinely publish good field-filed reporting that meet the criteria above. Of course, these outlets also publish pieces that do not correspond to the criteria above. It may take you a minute, even possibly an hour, to keep sifting through articles till you find a “field-filed” piece:

• BBC News
• The Christian Science Monitor
• The Economist (no named authors, per editorial policy; this is an exception)
• The Guardian
• Al Jazeera English
• The New York Times
• National Public Radio
• The Washington Post
• The Los Angeles Times

There is no minimum or maximum length for the article that you choose, but it must be significant enough to generate one paragraph response by you as to how it relates to prisons in the United States. In general, this means that you should choose a “feature” article, as opposed to “breaking news,” since the latter is likely to be under-elaborated.

This discussion thread will be used for the weekly participation activity “follow the news” to accumulate hash marks toward your participation grade (refer to the attached rubric and to syllabus). For those of you who might miss a virtual class meeting or are unable to contribute to the course wiki one week, the “follow the news” activity is a great way to maintain participation.

Only new articles will receive a hash-mark towards participation.