Breaking News Exercise: "KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN"

"Fast Freddie here. The technical team from S3 has just arrived. Looks like four guys in suits. They've got a couple of suitcases with them and one was carrying a bright yellow toolbox, but that's about it. They didn't answer any questions.

I did get to speak to another family member of one of the people who is trapped in the vault. Soon Kwon's brother, Dak-Ho Kwon, said, 'I am eager for my sister to be released from the vault. This has been an extremely sad and frightening day and we all just want it to be over.'

Also, off the record, a police officer told me that the bank manager's family would be issuing a statement later on tonight — keep your eyes open for that."

ABOUT THE EXERCISE

The Breaking News Exercise was designed to provide a realistic and interactive journalism learning experience to its participants. The eight-hour exercise is designed to be a capstone educational experience, to be undertaken only after students have completed significant study in the basics of journalistic reporting, including ethics, narrative techniques, deadline reporting and news decision making. The exercise can be completed by one player or several players working together to make decisions about news coverage.

All that is needed to take part in the exercise is a personal blog, on which participants will publish breaking news updates throughout the experience. (You can watch a tutorial about starting a simple blog here.)

For the purposes of review, all events are currently displayed on this Website in chronological order. During an actual exercise, however, the events and updates will be programmed to appear at specifically designated times throughout the exercise — mirroring the conditions of a breaking news event in which information unfolds, piece by piece, over the course of many hours.

While the exercise can be completed without any human facilitator, instructors are encouraged to "enter the game" by taking on the role of one or more "shadow players" who can interact on a personal basis with participants — taking phone calls, exchanging e-mails and chatting via text or video to provide an even more dynamic learning experience. These roles are only limited by the instructor's imagination, but might include a victim's family member, a police spokesperson, or a confidential informant.

The characters and events depicted in this exercise are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

Special thanks to:
• Amos Guiora, whose annual counter-terrorism experiential learning activity at the University of Utah inspired the creation of this exercise.
• Bill Hopkinson, whose mandate to produce "a piece of extraordinary interactivity" resulted in this project.

Breaking News Exercise

INSTRUCTIONS

"KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN"

ABOUT THE EXERCISE