High school students to visit fake crime scene as part of multimedia journalism workshop at UNT

Tuesday, July 15, 2014 - 18:15
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What: High school students in the University of North Texas' first Multimedia High School Journalism Summer Workshop taking photos and shooting video at UNT's Crime Scene City, which simulates crime scenes with fingerprints, bloodstains and other evidence.

When: 1 p.m. July 22 (Tuesday)

Where: UNT's Crime Scene City, 940 Precision Road, Denton

DENTON (UNT), Texas -- It's not often that teenagers can visit a place like the set of the popular television show "CSI," where they can dust for fingerprints, find invisible fake bloodstains using BlueStar --a chemical that grows blue in the presence of blood -- and gather other criminal evidence.

To learn how to cover crime scenes as journalists, 12 incoming high school juniors and seniors and recent high school graduates will visit the University of North Texas' Crime Scene City -- which is used for the university's criminalistics courses -- as part of their training in UNT's first Multimedia High School Journalism Summer Workshop.

The workshop, sponsored by UNT's Frank W. and Sue Mayborn School of Journalism, will take place July 17-24 (Thursday-Thursday). The students, all from schools in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, will be on the UNT campus in Denton July 20-24 (Sunday-Thursday) after they attend the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Grapevine July 17-20 (Thursday-Sunday).

Funded by a grant by the Dow Jones News Fund, the Multimedia High School Journalism Summer Workshop will give aspiring journalists experience in multimedia storytelling through news articles, online photo galleries, blogs and broadcast news packages. The stories they cover will be related to the theme of this year's conference -- Narratives on the Cutting Edge: Writing about Science, Technology, Medicine and Innovation.

The students will visit Crime Scene City at 940 Precision Drive in Denton at 1 p.m. July 22 (Tuesday).

Other students in the workshop will create a multimedia story of:UNT's Pohl Recreation Center, which is the largest exercise facility in the nation retrofitted with ReRev technology, which captures the kinetic energy from aerobic exercise to produce clean, renewable energy. Each of the center's 36 elliptical machines can transform a typical 30-minute workout into the power needed for a light bulb for more than two hours, a laptop for one hour or a television for 10 minutes. The students will be at the center at 3 p.m. July 22 (Tuesday).

In addition, the students will cover stories at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, which has been held every July since 2005 at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center in Grapevine. It is sponsored by UNT's Frank W. Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism.

The students will show their multimedia stories during a mock television newscast from 7 p.m.-9 p.m. July 23 (Wednesday) that will be uploaded to a website. The Multimedia High School Journalism Workshop will end with a noon graduation ceremony July 24 (Thursday) at UNT's Willis Library.

Note to reporters: To make arrangements to interview students in the Multimedia High School Journalism Workshop, contact Nancy Kolsti in the UNT News Service at 940-565-3509 or nancy.kolsti@unt.edu.

UNT News Service
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(940) 565-2108