Sacramento Bee columnist Jon Ortiz to speak at CSU, Sacramento

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - Sacramento Bee columnist Jon Ortiz is slated to speak to the CSU, Sacramento Column Writing class Wednesday at noon.

Ortiz

Ortiz will be focusing on two columns he wrote in the past six months, with the column-writing students expected to compare  content and style - as well as analyze how successful the articles were at making their respective points.

Both columns are part of the popular State Worker series written by Ortiz.

His visit to class comes one week after the class talked with Marcos Breton, Metro columnist for The Bee.

Breton talked about politics, his years as a student journalist at San Jose State and how he landed his current position with The Bee.

Magazine writers file How-To stories, Breton on tap for column class

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The writers in the magazine writing class at CSU, Sacramento have posted the first drafts of their How-To stories in the last 24-hours. (The drafts are posted to the right of this blog, just below the columns of the column-writing class.)

The pieces vary from How To Lose Weight Without Really Trying (are you ready, Oprah?) to How To Create a Digital Scrapbook. The students will be getting their first drafts returned within a week, with about another week to do a rewrite. In the meantime, what they have written is available to peruse here.

Next up for the magazine writers is to select a person to profile, someone who might figure prominently in their major feature, due at the end of the semester.

And in column writing this week, Sacramento Bee Metro columnist Marcos Breton will be visiting class Wednesday.

Breton has visited the column-writing class for several semesters running, giving the class insight into what it is like being a newspaper columnist - and the challenges of print journalism with so much competing electronic media.

Breton is a dedicated Twitter person, too. He has 1,840 followers as of today.

Marcos Breton

Sac Bee's Marcos Breton on tap for Column Writing class

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - This week the column-writing class at CSU, Sacramento is hoping to hear from Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos Breton as a guest speaker in class. Breton, who in the past has written about and sports and other feature-type stories for the newspaper, now is a major city-side columnist.

In recent months, he has written a lot about the Kevin Johnson-Heather Fargo race for mayor of Sacramento.

And most recently (Sunday), he wrote about the controversial Proposition 8 which state voters just approved.

Tolerance or intolerance?

Marcos Breton

Breton was scheduled to speak in class a few weeks ago, but like so many other staff members at the Bee, has been busy doing his job - and a lot more - to help the newspaper with its struggles in the down economy and had to cancel.