Writing
for the Media
News
News is a construct of
journalism. News is what journalists say it is. News relies on shared
experiences – shared pictures in our heads – about what is going on in our
society
Why is news important?
• It fulfills our psychic need to know what is
going on around us; to feel a part of our society and environment
• News helps us make decisions about our lives
– from what to wear on a particular day to where to live, what to do and how to
spend our lives.
• News helps us prioritize our lives
-- alerts us to dangers
-- lets us know what to anticipate
-- lets us know what others are thinking
• News is part of the shared information –
information we assume everyone else has – that makes us a part of a community.
• News allows us to participate in civic
life, to take part in discussion and debate.
|
Immediacy A
story that has just happened is news;
one that happened a few days ago is
history. Immediacy is timeliness.
Proximity Readers
are interested in what happens close to them. Proximity is the nearness of an
event to the readers or listeners and how closely it touches their lives.
People are interested mainly in themselves, their families, their friends and
their home towns.
Consequence News
of change or news
that affects human relations is news of
consequence. The more people affected, the greater the news value.
Conflict Sporting
events, wars and revolutions are the most common examples of conflict in the
news. Man maybe pitted against man, team against team, nation against nation or
man against the natural elements.
Oddity The
unusual or strange will help lift a story out of the ordinary.
Sex- Sometimes
sex is the biggest single element in news, or at least it appears to be the
element that attracts readers the most. The element of sex ranges from front-page
sensationalism to news
involving engagements and marriages. Stories and accompanying
pictures of movie stars or other prominent celebrities
Emotion/Human
Interest -The emotional element, sometimes called
the human interest element, covers all the
feelings that human beings have,
including happiness, sadness, anger,
sympathy, ambition, hate, love, envy, generosity and humor. Emotion is comedy;
emotion is tragedy; it is the interest man has in mankind. A good
human interest story can range from a
real “tearjerker” to a rollicking farce.
Prominence -Prominence
is a one-word way of saying “names make news.” When a person is prominent,
like the President, almost anything he does is newsworthy — even his church
attendance.
Progress- In
our technologically advanced society, we are interested in
space exploration/nuclear exploration/medicine.
Spot and Created News
Spot news-just happens.
A plane crashes. A heroic
rescue takes place in
a storm-tossed sea. These are just a few examples.
Created news-is
generally concerned with something an
organization has done or plans to do which the public should know about.
Classes of News Stories
Hard News It
usually concerns a news item involving or affecting the readers, listeners or
viewers. The hard news story has usually taken place since a previous issue of
a newspaper or a radio or television newscast. Much of the material found in
daily papers (especially front-page items) or newscasts are in the hard news
category. The hard news story is designed primarily to inform. In Kenya, Mostly
political/govt issues.
Soft news: More
of feature stories focusing on human interest.
News style vs. Literary English
- Literature is known for encouraging dramatic
styles, vivid descriptions and the eloquent conversation of characters.
However, such writing differs from the fundamentals
of Newswriting.
- Almost any idea, no matter how complicated, can be
expressed in simple language.
- As a journalist, you may have to explain some
fairly technical ideas to readers who are not familiar with some concepts.
You will have to do it in language they will understand. It is up to you
to do the work of simplification, not your readers
- Media writing is geared to the public, not the professor.
The purpose is to inform, not to impress
- If readers find your writing is over their heads,
they will skip your piece and go on to something that is easier to read.
If this happens, you are not doing your job.
THE ABCs OF Writing for the
media
Some principles of
newswriting you must apply every time you attempt to
put words on paper include accuracy, brevity, clarity,
coherence, emphasis, objectivity and unity.
ACCURACY-Accuracy
should never be violated. The media writer works with facts. These facts will
involve persons, places and things. They will involve names, ages, titles
or ratings, addresses and descriptions. One cannot afford to be casual in
approach to facts. Readers will often judge the media organization on what you
say and how you say it. An easy way to lose the public’s respect and confidence
is by being careless in your handling of facts. Attribution relates to
accuracy. It means that you name the person who makes any statement that may be
challenged.
Good
quotations;
- liven a story
- Give it color
- Aid in development of coherence.
- Ensures that the reader does not get the
impression the statement is the writer’s personal opinion.
Brevity By
all means, be brief, but not at the expense of completeness. The key is to boil
down your writing and eliminate garbage. A compact piece of writing is
frequently much stronger than a lengthy story. An example is Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address.
Clarity Avoid
misunderstanding and ambiguity in writing. If there is any chance of
misunderstanding, readers will misunderstand. Reread what you
have written looking for points that could
lead to readers’ misunderstanding.
Coherence An
article that skips illogically from topic to topic and back again in a jumbled
lacks coherence. Facts should follow facts in some kind of reasonable
order. It may be logical order, chronological order, place order or order of
importance, depending on the subject, but order of one kind or another is
vital. Outlining will often help.
Emphasis Make
sure your writing emphasizes what you want it to. You assure this in
Newswriting by putting the most important fact first (the lead). Other types of
arrangements for emphasis are used in feature stories or in.editorials-2be
discussed later.
Objectivity To
report news accurately, you must keep yourself detached from
the happenings and present
an impersonal, unbiased, unprejudiced story. Avoid emotionalism-Al
Jazeera.
Unity A news
story should deal with one basic topic. There may be many facts and ins and
outs to the story, but it is still one story. Avoid two stories in one.
THE LANGUAGE OF NEWSWRITING
Written language is made up of
three elements — words, sentences and paragraphs. It. is the way these elements
are handled that makes the difference
between literary and news English. Briefly, let us look at these elements
separately.
Words-Words are
your basic tools. Like any skilled technician, you
should be able to select the best tools to do the best job.
-
use words that say exactly what you
mean so they can be understood by others.
-
Every word used in a news story should
add to the picture you are building in the minds of your readers. If you use an
unnecessary, vague or unfamiliar word, this picture becomes
blurred.
-
It is an axiom of Newswriting that
words that do not work for you, work against you. tips on making words work for
you.
Avoid confused writing.— (science writing) often marked
by pseudotechnical language that readers cannot
understand. In writing a technical story,
do not parrot the
words some technical-minded researcher pours out.
Simplify. Ask, “What does this mean in everyday English?” Few people,
for example, know what
“arteriosclerosis” means. But when you say “hardening of the
arteries,” they immediately understand.
Avoid
Verbiage. —inexperienced writers put unnecessary words into their news copy.
Call a spade a spade, not
“a long-handled agricultural implement
utilized for the purpose of dislodging
the earth’s crust.” Short, common words are easy to understand
when, in many cases, long words are not. If you must use a longer word,
make sure you are using it to
convey a special meaning, eg.
This
also applies to veracity
for truth, monumental for big, apprehension for fear, canine for dog
“due to the fact that” instead of “because”?
Be Specific.
— Inexactness is just as bad as wordiness. Readers
want to know specific
facts. Consider the following example of this:
Vague: Some Kogelo villagers were turned away that afternoon.
Specific: Ten Kogelo villagers were
turned away before the Obama inauguration.
Avoid
trite/h a c k n e y e d expressions—
These are the mark of either an amateur or a
lazy writer. Some particularly
bad examples include the following: Cheap as dirt Smart as a whip, Fat
as a pig Nipped in the bud, Good as gold, Wee hours, Ripe old age, Picture of
health, Crystal clear, Quick as lightning, Bouncing baby boy/girl.
Use strong,
active verbs. — Whenever possible, use active voice and the simple past tense.
The use of these injects life, action and movement into your news stories. In Newswriting,
adverbs often do nothing more than clutter writing. Consider the following
example:
Weak (passive
voice): The visitors were warmly
received by the prime minister in his office. Stronger (active voice): The
Prime Minister received the visitors in his office.
Avoid
Jargon-From any professional perspective
Watch
Spelling and Grammar –have good wrting skills and proper command of the
language.
Use a
stylebook. — In newswriting, the word style refers to the spelling,
punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation and similar mechanical aspects of grammar
used in preparing copy (a term used to describe all news manuscripts).
Most newspapers and other periodicals have their
own style sheets or
local interpretations of style rules. The important thing for you
to remember about style is consistency.
Sentences-The
second element of language is the sentence. The simple declarative sentence
that consists of subject and verb, or subject, verb and
object is the most common form in normal,
informal conversation. For this reason, it is the best
sentence structure for most newswriting.
Notice
how the following sentence
becomes more simple sentences:
Sentence:
Following his graduation from Moi University in
1988, Chege was hired by the Central Bank, where he served
three years as assistant communications officer.
Rewrite:
Chege graduated from Moi University in 1988. He worked for
three years at the central Bank as assistant communications officer.
Simplifying
sentences is not difficult, but it does take a little practice. In time, you
can learn to use just the right number of words to achieve maximum clarity without
destroying smoothness. There are no absolute rules, but a fair guide is to try to
keep sentences to 30 words or less and to shoot for 17 to 20. Vary the length
of your sentences. For example, you might use a
four-word sentence, then a 15-word sentence,
then an eight-word sentence, followed by
a 30-word sentence. This keeps
your writing from becoming singsong.
Do not
clutter.— Never crowd too many details into
one sentence. Although a compound or complex
sentence may contain more than one thought, you should, for
the most part, stick to sentences that
express one thought clearly and concisely. Otherwise, the reader is
apt to get lost in a mass of
clauses and details.
Do not
repeat— If you say in the lead of your story that 61 people were killed in an
accident, do not mention later in the story that 61 were killed. If the readers
forget a fact, they can look back. Space in media is valuable; do not
waste it with redundancy. Refrain from beginning a sentence with the same word as
the last word in the previous sentence and avoid beginning consecutive
sentences alike, unless you do it deliberately for emphasis.
Paragraphs-
- The most general guideline for writing paragraphs
is that they should be kept reasonably short.
- When you use short paragraphs, you give the
reader facts and ideas in smaller packages that are easier to handle. The
mind can grasp a small unit of thought more easily than a large unit.
- Most news copy is set in narrow columns with only
three to five words per line. Paragraphs should be less than 60 words.
- Two or three sentences per paragraph are just
about right, but it is perfectly acceptable
to have a one-sentence paragraph,
or even a one-word paragraph, if it expresses a complete thought. Yet, a
succession of very short paragraphs may give a choppy effect to the
writing.
- For best effect, alternate paragraphs of short
and medium length. Never begin succeeding paragraphs with the same
words or phrases. This, too, can cause a monotonous effect that will soon discourage
the reader.
Nb: (Augment
this reading with the handout on ‘common errors in journalistic writing)
News REPORT
In
fiction/literary writing the writer deliberately holds back the climax to build
suspense and to make sure the reader reads the entire story. Most news stories,
however, are constructed in just the opposite fashion. The climax is
presented first.
This
method packs the most important facts
together with the barest necessary explanatory material into the first
paragraph-the summary lead.
A news story
then moves into the detailed
portion of the story (the body) by covering the facts in diminishing order of
importance.
This form of
newswriting is commonly known as the
inverted pyramid style because when it is diagramed, it appears as an
upside-down pyramid
ADVANTAGES
OF THE INVERTED PYRAMID STYLE
Presents
Pertinent Facts First Most readers have neither the time nor the desire to read
every word of every story in a newspaper. By using the summary lead, the writer
focuses the reader’s attention on the news, arouses the reader’s interest and
allows the reader to swiftly skim important facts. In other words, spill the
whole story in the first paragraph. The reader can decide whether to continue
reading the details or to go on to something else.
The primary
objective of a news story then, is not to withhold information, but to present
the facts with rapid, simple directness.
Facilitates
Page Layout The inverted pyramid method of story construction is a valuable
tool to the makeup person who is confronted with an eight-inch story and only
six inches of column space. If the story has been written in inverted pyramid
form, it becomes a simple matter of cutting lines of type from the bottom of
the story until it fits the available space
Facilitates
Headline Writing Headlines for news stories should tell the main facts in the briefest
form. If a story is written in the proper inverted pyramid style, the
copyreader (who writes the headline) can find these facts in the first
paragraph.
THE LEAD
The opening
paragraph of a news story is referred to as the lead (pronounced “leed”)-consist
of who-what-when-where-why-how.
The lead is the first and most important paragraph of
any news story. It attracts the reader and-states the important
facts first.
In writing a lead for a straight news story, the writer
must answer six basic questions about the event. Known as the five Ws and H
questions, they are as follows: who, what, where, when, why and how.
It is not necessary that a writer answer all of these questions in the lead
sentence. \
The lead contains the news peg and is the most important
part of the story. It can either make or break any news story.
No comments:
Post a Comment