Working Draft magazine provides CreComm students with professional publishing experience
When second-year Creative Communications students were deciding on topics for a project they’d spend the next six to seven months working on, Brianne Jamieson pitched the idea of telling her uncle’s story. Her uncle, Tyler Sneesby — better known as DJ Hunnicutt (shown above) — was quickly losing his vision.
Each of the 54 second-year students in the program were required to write a feature-length story for Working Draft, a new online magazine. The students worked with instructors Emily Cain and Karen Press on everything from determining the magazine’s name, writing the About section, and choosing a theme for the year — in this case, ‘Truth.’
“Truth can be taken so many ways,” says Jamieson. “A lot of people know my uncle, or know of him. Last April, when he started losing his right eyesight (after already losing his left eyesight), he wasn’t really telling anyone. He would run into people out in public, but he couldn’t see them to say hi.”
Jaimeson’s uncle had a huge story to tell, but didn’t really know how to tell it.
The students pitched their feature ideas to a panel of instructors in November, and — if approved — were able to create an outline and begin researching and writing. For the months that followed, the students were put into small groups to workshop and edit each other’s stories. They were also assigned to partners in another class section who would give their story a thorough proofread.
The result is a professional, feature-length story with multimedia components — including audio recordings, video and photography — that can be used as portfolio pieces.
“The idea for this came from a recent program renewal,” says Emily Cain, Writer’s Craft instructor for CreComm. “We were hearing from industry that storytelling is one of the qualities they’re looking for, and we decided to add in more writing courses. CreComm used to have a magazine project in first year, but this allowed us to take it to the next step and make it professional.” Read More →