Year one: I taught journalism exactly like I’d taught essays for five years before. And it was a mess. Students were cramming breaking news into five paragraphs. Opinion pieces had no call to action. Features read like research papers. I was bleeding red pen everywhere, and they were convinced they couldn’t write. The real problem wasn’t them. It was me, treating journalism like it was just essay writing with different subject matter.
Turns out it’s not. Journalism is its own thing entirely—AP style, the inverted pyramid, nut grafs, feature structure, captions that actually sell the photo, reviews that have teeth. These are separate genres, each with their own logic. Once I stopped trying to fit them into an essay rubric and built assessment rubrics for each type, the whole dynamic flipped. Students knew what they were building toward. Grading became straightforward. I wasn’t spending half the class period explaining why their news story didn’t work—the rubric already did that.
I built a set of seven rubrics, one for each type of journalism I assign regularly: hard news, short features, photo essays, editorials, captions, longform features, and reviews. They scale from middle school through college, and each one spells out exactly what you’re looking for. If you want to try one first, I have a free sample rubric for you to download and see how they work.
These rubrics save hours of grading and help your students actually write better journalism—not better essays. Grab the bundle here and watch the difference.
Starmaker English and Journalism Tools 
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