News style (also journalistic style or news writing) is the prose Prose is writing that resembles everyday speech. The word "prose" is derived from the Latin prosa, which literally translates to "straightforward". Prose is adopted for the discussion of facts and topical reading. Prose is often articulated in free form writing style. Thus, it may be used for books, newspapers, magazines, style used for news News is the communication of information on current events which is presented by print, broadcast, Internet, or word of mouth to a third party or mass audience reporting in media such as newspapers A newspaper is a publication containing news, information, and advertising. General-interest newspapers often feature articles on political events, crime, business, art/entertainment, society and sports. Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing columns that express the personal opinions of writers. Supplementary sections, radio Radio is the transmission of signals by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space. Information is carried by systematically changing some property of the radiated waves, such as and television Commercially available since the late 1930s, the television set has become a common communications receiver in homes, businesses and institutions, particularly as a source of entertainment and news. Since the 1970s the availability of video cassettes, laserdiscs, DVDs and now Blu-ray discs, have resulted in the television set frequently being used. News style encompasses not only vocabulary and sentence structure, but also the way in which stories present the information Information as a concept has a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation in terms of relative importance, tone, and intended audience.
News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event in the first two or three paragraphs, the Five Ws In journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws ) is a concept in news style, research, and in police investigations that are regarded as basics in information-gathering. It is a formula for getting the "full" story on something. The maxim of the Five Ws (and one H) is that in order for a report to be considered complete it must. This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid The inverted pyramid is a metaphor used to illustrate how information should be arranged or presented within a text, in particular within a news story," to refer to the decreased importance of information as it progresses.
News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.
Contents |
Overview
Newspapers generally adhere to an expository writing Expository writing is a type of writing, the purpose of which is to inform, explain, describe, or define the author's subject to the reader. Expository text is meant to ‘posit’ information and is the most frequently used type of writing by students in colleges and universities. A well-written exposition remains focused on its topic and lists mode and style, but over time and place journalism ethics Journalism ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and of good practice as applicable to the specific challenges faced by professional journalists. Historically and currently, this subset of media ethics is widely known to journalists as their professional "code of ethics" or the "canons of journalism". The basic and standards have varied in the degree of objectivity Objectivity is a significant principle of journalistic professionalism. Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and most importantly, nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities and sensationalism Sensationalism is a manner of being extremely controversial, loud, or attention grabbing. It is especially applied to the emphasis of the unusual or atypical. It is also a form of theatre incorporated. There are debated definitions of professionalism The word professional traditionally means a person who has obtained a professional level degree. The term professional is used more generally to denote a white collar working person, or a person who performs commercially in a field typically reserved for hobbyists or amateurs among particular news agencies A news agency is an organization of journalists established to supply news reports to organizations in the news trade: newspapers, magazines, and radio and television broadcasters. Such an agency may also be referred to as a wire service, newswire or news service, and their reputability or public value, according to professional standards of idealism and depending on what the reader wants from a news story, may be tied to their appearance of objectivity. In its most ideal form, news writing strives to be intelligible to the vast majority of potential readers, as well as to be engaging and succinct. Within the limits created by these goals, news stories also aim for a kind of comprehensiveness. However, other factors are involved, some of which are practical and derived from the media form, and others stylistic.
Among the larger and more respected newspapers, fairness and balance is a major factor for the presentation of information. Commentary is usually confined to a separate section, though each paper may have a different overall slant. Editorial policy dictates the use of adjectives, euphemisms, and idioms. Papers with an international audience, for example, usually use a more formal style of writing.
The specific choices made by a news outlet's editor or editorial board are often collected in a style guide A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for design and writing of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication or organization. Style guides are prevalent for general and specialized use, for the general reading and writing audience, and for students and scholars of the various academic disciplines, medicine, or stylebook; common commercial stylebooks are the "AP Style Manual" and the "US News Style Book". The main goals of news writing can be summarized by the ABCs of journalism: accuracy, brevity, and clarity.[1]
Terms and structure
Journalistic prose is explicit and precise, and tries not to rely on jargon. As a rule, journalists will not use a long word when a short one will do. They use subject-verb-object construction and vivid, active prose. They offer anecdotes, examples and metaphors, and they rarely depend on colorless generalizations or abstract ideas. News writers try to avoid using the same word more than once in a paragraph (sometimes called an "echo" or "word mirror").
Headline (or hed)
Main article: Headline It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not be set in typeThe head of a story, in newsman's jargon.
Subhead (or dek)
A phrase, sentence or several sentences near the title of an article or story.
Lead or intro
The most important structural element of a story is the lead or "intro" (in the UK) —the story's first, or leading, sentence. Some American English American English , also known as United States English or U.S. English, is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two thirds of native speakers of English live in the United States speakers use the spelling lede (pronounced /ˈliːd/), from the archaic English, used to avoid confusion with the printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a medium , thereby transferring an image. The mechanical systems involved were first assembled in Germany by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, based on existing screw-presses used to press cloth, grapes, etc. and possibly prints. Gutenberg type formerly made from lead Lead is a main-group element with symbol Pb (Latin: plumbum) and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal, also considered to be one of the heavy metals. Lead has a bluish-white color when freshly cut, but tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed to air. It has a shiny chrome-silver luster when melted into a liquid or the related typographical term leading In typography, leading refers to the amount of added vertical spacing between lines of type. In consumer-oriented word processing software, this concept is usually referred to as "line spacing", but in page layout software such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign the term "leading" is still used. Leading may sometimes be confused.[2] Charnley (1966) stated that "an effective lead is a "brief, sharp statement of the story's essential facts"" (p. 166). The lead is usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences, and is ideally 20-25 words in length. The top-loading principle applies especially to leads, but the unreadability of long sentences constrains its size. This makes writing a lead an optimization problem, in which the goal is to articulate the most encompassing and interesting statement that a writer can make in one sentence, given the material with which he or she has to work. While a rule of thumb says the lead should answer most or all of the 5 Ws In journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws ) is a concept in news style, research, and in police investigations that are regarded as basics in information-gathering. It is a formula for getting the "full" story on something. The maxim of the Five Ws (and one H) is that in order for a report to be considered complete it must, few leads can fit all of these.
To "bury the lead" in news style, refers to beginning a description with details of secondary importance to the readers, forcing them to read more deeply into an article than they should have to in order to discover the essential point.
Article leads are sometimes categorized into hard leads and soft leads. A hard lead aims to provide a comprehensive thesis which tells the reader what the article will cover. A soft lead introduces the topic in a more creative, attention-seeking fashion, and is usually followed by a nut graph In journalism, a nut graph is a paragraph, particularly in a feature story, that explains the news value of the story. The term is also spelled as nut graf, nut 'graph, nutgraph, nutgraf. It is a contraction of the expression nutshell paragraph, i.e., "in a nutshell" paragraph, dated at least to the 19th century. Sometimes the expression (a brief summary of facts).[3]
Media critics[who?] often note that the lead can be the most polarizing subject in the article. Often critics accuse the article of bias based on an editor's choice in headline and lead.[citation needed]
Example Lead-and-Summary Design
Humans will be going to the moon again. The NASA announcement came as the agency requested ten trillion dollars of appropriations for the project. ...
Example Soft-Lead Design
NASA is proposing another space project. The agency's budget request, announced today, included a plan to send another person to the moon. This time the agency hopes to establish a long-term facility as a jumping-off point for other space adventures. The budget requests approximately ten gazillion dollars for the project. ...
Two other terms common in editing are hed and dek or deck. Hed is used to denote an article's headline or heading. Dek refers to a quick blurb or article teaser.[4]
Nut graph
Main article: Nut graph In journalism, a nut graph is a paragraph, particularly in a feature story, that explains the news value of the story. The term is also spelled as nut graf, nut 'graph, nutgraph, nutgraf. It is a contraction of the expression nutshell paragraph, i.e., "in a nutshell" paragraph, dated at least to the 19th century. Sometimes the expressionOne or more paragraphs, particularly in a feature story, that explain the news value of the story.
Inverted pyramid
Journalism instructors usually describe the organization or structure of a news story as an inverted pyramid The inverted pyramid is a metaphor used to illustrate how information should be arranged or presented within a text, in particular within a news story. The journalist top-loads the essential and most interesting elements of his or her story, with supporting information following in order of diminishing importance.
This structure enables readers to stop reading at any point and still come away with the essence of a story. It allows people to enter a topic to the depth that their curiosity takes them, and without the imposition of details or nuances that they would consider irrelevant, but still making that information available to more interested readers.
The inverted pyramid structure also enables articles to be trimmed to any arbitrary length during layout, to fit in the space available.
Inexperienced writers are often admonished "Don't bury the lead!" A lead paragraph in Literature refers to the opening paragraph of an article, essay, news story or book chapter. Often called just "the lead", it usually opens together with the headline or title, almost always gives the reader the main idea of the story preceding the main body of the article and the final conclusion. The "lead" to ensure that they present the most important facts first, rather than requiring the reader to go through several paragraphs to find them.
Some writers start their stories with the "1-2-3 lead". This format invariably starts with a 5W opening paragraph (as described above), followed by an indirect quote that serves to support a major element of the first paragraph, and then a direct quote to support the indirect quote.
Feature style
News stories aren't the only type of material that appear in newspapers and magazines. Longer articles, such as magazine cover articles and the pieces that lead the inside sections of a newspaper, are known as features A feature story is a piece of journalistic writing that covers a selected issue in-depth. As such, a feature need not address an immediately topical subject as would be expected of a news story, is usually considerably longer, and may well present an opinionated view. Feature stories differ from straight news in several ways. Foremost is the absence of a straight-news lead, most of the time. Instead of offering the essence of a story up front, feature writers may attempt to lure readers in.
While straight news stories always stay in third person point of view, it's not uncommon for a feature magazine article to slip into first person. The journalist will often detail his or her interactions with interview subjects, making the piece more personal.
A feature's first paragraphs often relate an intriguing moment or event, as in an "anecdotal lead". From the particulars of a person or episode, its view quickly broadens to generalities about the story's subject.
The section that signals what a feature is about is called the nut graf In journalism, a nut graph is a paragraph, particularly in a feature story, that explains the news value of the story. The term is also spelled as nut graf, nut 'graph, nutgraph, nutgraf. It is a contraction of the expression nutshell paragraph, i.e., "in a nutshell" paragraph, dated at least to the 19th century. Sometimes the expression or billboard. Billboards appear as the third or fourth paragraph from the top, and may be up to two paragraphs long. Unlike a lede, a billboard rarely gives everything away. This reflects the fact that feature writers aim to hold their readers' attention to the end, which requires engendering curiosity and offering a "payoff." Feature paragraphs tend to be longer than those of news stories, with smoother transitions between them. Feature writers use the active-verb construction and concrete explanations of straight news, but often put more personality in their prose.
Feature stories often close with a "kicker" rather than simply petering out.
See also
References
Notes
- ^ Page Moved - Bill Parks, Journalism Instructor - Ohlone College
- ^ [1]
- ^ Unzipped! Newswriting by Chris Kensler
- ^ What the Heck Is a Hed/Dek? Learning the Lingo in Periodical Publishing By Janene Mascarella
Bibliography
- Linda Jorgensen. Real-World Newsletters (1999)
- Mark Levin. The Reporter's Notebook : Writing Tools for Student Journalists (2000)
- Buck Ryan and Michael O'Donnell. The Editor's Toolbox: A Reference Guide for Beginners and Professionals, (2001)
- Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative Newspaper, (2002)
- M. L. Stein, Susan Paterno, and R. Christopher Burnett, The Newswriter's Handbook Introduction to Journalism (2006)
- Bryan A. Garner. The Winning Brief: 100 Tips for Persuasive Briefing in Trial and Appellate Court (1999)
- Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (1998)
- Steve Peha and Margot Carmichael Lester, Be a Writer: Your Guide to the Writing Life (2006)
- Andrea Sutcliffe. New York Public Library Writer's Guide to Style and Usage, (1994)
- Bill Walsh, The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English (2004)
External links
Categories: Newswriting
Ecommerce Journal
And this can be attributed to the fact that writing a business plan is not as easy as it sounds. You will have to put in a lot of hard work to learn this ...
Check Your Business Plan Reader's Digest
all 2 news articles »
Video for YOU
ue, 30 Jun 2009 04:44:00 GM
News. style (also journalistic style or . news writing. ) is the prose style used for . news. reporting in media such as newspapers, radio and television. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_writing . News Writing. is one of several academic events ...
Q. Tomorrow is my interview for my school's Broadcasting Anchors we are about 10 and only 4 will be picked. One of my requirements is to write a news story on whatever we want, I decided to do one on an Arizona killing. This is the Article- Two people were fatally shot and another five injured including a police officer during a standoff Sunday at a home in Arizona, authorities said.The multiple shooting in Mesa occurred when a man got into an altercation during a graduation party, said Sgt. Ed Wessing, a spokesman for the Mesa Police Department.Authorities did not immediately say what led to the altercation.The suspect went to his car, got a gun and shot two people dead on the front lawn, Wessing said.Police were eventually able to… [cont.]
Asked by star - Mon May 25 00:14:29 2009 - - 1 Answers - 0 Comments
A. this is pretty good so far- keep on working! good luck! :)
Answered by unknown - Mon May 25 00:18:11 2009
