Idea for class: Blogging assignment
One of the things we try to get journalism students to do is, um, read other people’s blogs. And not only their friends’ blogs! So I had a brainstorm for an assignment:
- Choose any three blogs from this list of The world’s 50 most powerful blogs (from The Guardian). Make an introductory post linking to each one of your three, and explain why you chose it from the list.
- During your 12-week blogging assignment, four of your posts must be about one of the three blogs you chose. Please review at least the past seven days’ worth of posts in the blog before you write about it. You may write about only one of the blogs in a post, but you will eventually need to write about one week from each one of the three blogs. (Obviously, with four posts, you will have to write about one of them twice.)
- Link to your own introductory post in each of the four posts that come later.
If anyone knows of another such eclectic list, bring it on!


I ran into Time.com’s Top 25 Blogs not long after reading your post this morning.
Valleywag aggregated it because they hated having to click through the whole list.
April 16, 2008 at 9:28 amI’ve not heard of most of those blogs, but I unabashedly love icanhascheezeburger.com. That, along with cuteoverload.com, I visit on a daily basis. For the cute-enthused there’s also dailykitten.com and dailypuppy.com.
April 16, 2008 at 12:50 pmIf I was in your class, I would think this is a good assignment. Another option you can give them are any blogs that they find interesting enough to them that will help them with their writing skills. Sometimes it does not have to be the popular blogs they can write about as long as they are update and worth writing about. You can check my blog out if you want!
April 16, 2008 at 10:16 pm[...] to ask every journalist to pick a few blogs to read and start posting on them. I got this idea from journalism professor Mindy McAdams, who is asking her students to pick a few blogs and post on them. McAdams came up with the idea [...]
April 17, 2008 at 1:17 pm