Building a semester of journalism curriculum from scratch is one of the more quietly exhausting things a teacher can do. You’re pulling from five different sources, writing rubrics at 10pm, and by October, you’re not entirely sure the thing you built in August still makes sense. I’ve done this more times than I care to count.
After 23 years(and counting) teaching high school English and journalism, the honest truth is this: the instruction isn’t the hard part.
Most journalism teachers know how to teach a lead. The hard part is everything around it — finding lead writing practice that doesn’t feel like a worksheet from 1957, building a rubric that captures what good journalism actually looks like, having bell ringers ready that aren’t just filler, and then figuring out how to end the semester with something that feels like it mattered. Any one of those is manageable. All of them, across 18 weeks, is where things get messy.
I stopped rebuilding from scratch every summer when I started paying closer attention to what my own students wanted to do.
The way I figured that out was through a market research project — I had students design surveys, collect data on audience preferences, and present findings. It’s genuinely useful for them as a journalism exercise. It was also genuinely useful for me as a teacher.
If you want to try something similar, you can grab my Journalism: Market Research Survey Project — it’s a complete project package covering survey design, data collection, and final presentation, and it’s a good early-semester unit regardless of what else you’re teaching.
What I learned from my own students shaped the curriculum I eventually put together. They wanted to write stories that felt real. So that’s what I built around.
My News Writing Semester Curriculum is 22 resources across 18 weeks — inverted pyramid instruction, lead writing practice with answer keys, a full headline workshop, photography fundamentals, caption writing, a short feature unit, 180+ bell ringers, and a final portfolio where students produce three published-quality news stories complete with headlines, captions, and a written reflection. Rubrics and answer keys for everything. Nothing you need to go find elsewhere.
If you spend any part of your summer hunting down journalism materials and hoping they’ll connect into something coherent, this is what I use instead.
Starmaker English and Journalism Tools 
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