News Writing

As we say goodbye to the "Journalism Now" module, we are greeted warmly with a new module which is "News Writing", which is pretty much learning how to write for a news paper. I'm just going to go over the basics of the lectures, so it'll be a brief one people.

Firstly we need to know "what is news?"

• News could be many things - such as new stuff that happens
• People doing things
• You probably get the idea of that part...

When writing an article you need to have what is known as a 'news peg'. This is pretty much an angle that you're going to take with your article, for example you hear about a dog biting a child and this will be your news peg - it will lead to many stories about dogs attacking children springing up.

The difference between hard and soft news:

• Hard news is all about no holds barred, you must tell the story in all its brutality (if that is the case) for example start with people being hurt, just dive right in with "23 people dead in car crash"
• A soft news story tries instead to entertain or advise the reader, news such as celebrities or advice columns

When thinking about the story you want to report on you must think about the audience, for example if you're a journalist working for the Daily Star then you will be reporting on things such as Big Brother, whereas if you were working for the Telegraph then you would completely ignore any news such as that.

Quite possibly the most important things to consider when writing a news story is making sure you answer 5 key questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why?

You have to make sure you mention at least the first four of those in your top par - this is the most important par and it could make or break any potential article. The first par must be short and sharp, at least 20-30 words have the latest and most interesting information and it has to be fantastic. Then from this you can link in your second par with other important information that is necessary, also this would be a good place to put quotes in.

I've been told this before but now its official im afraid; no-one cares about your opinion... Sad times. We must be objective we can’t go round describing news as good or bad and let our values seep in through the writing process of the article. We're not trying to form people's ideas for them; if something is horrific let them figure it out.

Well I think that this will suffice for now, I’ll be sure to keep my blog updated and not slip behind, and ratings are everything after all!

Bye and stuff x