I love the general idea — taking readers inside the newsroom, where the decisions on what gets covered and what doesn’t are made. And the beginning of the video, set in a story conference meeting room, made me think we might get a good bit of that.

But we didn’t, really. The video camera quickly moved into the newsroom, where reporters and editors were interviewed about stories that presumably will be pushed out to the web and print in the next 12 hours. These interviews essentially became two-minute promotions for the stories.

So we didn’t see anyone explain why the Rio Tinto story is more important to NYT readers than the European airline strike (Okay, kinda bad examples … but it is the day after health care reform passed the House…). And we certainly didn’t see any debate between decision-makers, debate that has to happen every day at a place like NYT.

Should the Times show a little more of its inner workings in TimesCast? Could it? Could your favorite media outlet (or the one that employs me) ramp up to that level of transparency? When I have time for a longer post …

Watch the TimesCast video

Also, three students are running live blogs:

Josh Brennock

Nick McDowell

David Weightman

As a class, we will produce an in-depth report with several elements:

- Game story from U.S. perspective
- Game story from Spanish perspective
- Sidebar (your choice of an interesting secondary storyline)
- Column (opinion on some aspect of the game)
- Live blog
- Live Twitter
- Web roundup (links from postmatch coverage online and your comments, using a variety of sources)

How we’ll decide who does what: Send me an email with your top four choices, in order, from the list above. I’ll drawn an order at random and give you your first available choice. No more than three students will do any one assignment.

Email your preference list to me at jon-DOT-denunzio-AT-gmail-DOT-com or leave it in the comments below.

UPDATE: Helpful links:

- Steve Goff’s pregame notes on Soccer Insider

- Live Blog from US-Italy game last week (Wall Street Journal)

Yes, I have spent a good portion of the last 24 hours in WordPress dashboards and the result is a blog for each of the 16 sports writing students at the 2009 MPSA  Summer Journalism Program at the University of Maryland.

All 16 students are listed on my “MPSA Class” page, along with links to their blogs.

Besides setting up these blogs, we spent class time today debating exactly who is (or isn’t) a sports journalist and discussing what the challenging new media world means for aspiring sports writers. We also talked about the basics of good news writing and talked about the one athlete we would profile if we could interview anyone. This led to several mini-debates, including one of my favorites: should Pete Rose be in baseball’s Hall of Fame?

The highlight of the day was Dan Steinberg‘s visit, I assume.  The guy behind the D.C. Sports Bog talked about his career path, his theories on blogging and how to bring unique content to readers day in, day out. He also got two Tweets out of the visit: here’s one, and here’s the other.

On to Tuesday. Looks like we’ll start on preview stories, take a sports quiz and add some more links — and perhaps flavor — to our blogs.