News style (also journalistic style or news writing style) is the prose Prose is the most typical form of language. The English word 'prose' is derived from the Latin prōsa, which literally translates as 'straight-forward.' While there are critical debates on the construction of prose, its simplicity and loosely defined structure has led to its adoption for the majority of spoken dialogue, factual discourse as well 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 regularly scheduled publication containing news, information, and advertising. By 2007 there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a day (55 million in the U.S). The worldwide recession of 2008, combined with the rapid growth of web-based alternatives, caused a serious decline in advertising and, 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 Television is a widely used telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images, either monochromatic ("black and white") or color, usually accompanied by sound. "Television" may also refer specifically to a television set, television programming or television transmission. The word is derived from mixed Latin. News style encompasses not only vocabulary A person's vocabulary is the set of words they are familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge and sentence structure In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. Linguists do not normally use the, but also the way in which stories present the information Information, in its most restricted technical sense, is an ordered sequence of symbols. As a concept, however, information has many meanings. Moreover, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation in terms of relative importance, tone Tone is a literary technique that is a part of composition, which encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, or many other possible attitudes. Tone and mood are not interchangeable, and intended audience An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature , theatre, music or academics in any medium. Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of art; some events invite overt audience participation and others allowing only modest clapping and criticism and reception.
News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about any particular event - who, what, when, where and why (the Five Ws In journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws , or Six 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 for a report to be considered complete it must) and also often how - at the opening of the article. This form of structure is sometimes called the "inverted pyramid The inverted pyramid is a metaphor used by journalists and other writers to illustrate the placing of the most important information first within a text. It is the most widely preferred method in writing news stories.[citation needed]", to refer to the decreasing importance of information in subsequent paragraphs.
News stories also contain at least one of the following important characteristics relative to the intended audience: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence.
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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 deposit 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 style. 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 nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities or sensationalism The term is commonly used in reference to the mass media. Critics of media bias of all political stripes often charge the media with engaging in sensationalism in their reporting and conduct. That is, the notion that media outlets often choose to report heavily on stories with shock value or attention-grabbing names or events, rather than they incorporate. Definitions of professionalism The word professional traditionally means a person who has obtained a degree in a professional field. 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 differ among 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; their reputations, according to professional standards, and depending on what the reader wants, are often tied to the appearance of objectivity. In its most ideal form, news writing strives to be intelligible to the majority of readers, as well as to be engaging and succinct. Within these limits, news stories also aim to be comprehensive. However, other factors are involved, some of which are derived from the media form, and others stylistic.
Among the larger and more respected newspapers, fairness and balance is a major factor in presenting 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 the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field. The implementation of a style guide provides uniformity in style and formatting of a document; common style guides include 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 (see Grammar In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. Linguists do not normally use the). They offer anecdotes An anecdote is a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always presented as based on a real incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, usually in an identifiable place. However, over time, modification in reuse may convert, examples and metaphors A metaphor is an analogy between two objects or ideas; the analogy is conveyed by the use of a metaphorical word in place of some other word. For example: "Her eyes were glistening jewels", and they rarely depend on colorless generalizations A generalization of a concept is an extension of the concept to less-specific criteria. It is a foundational element of logic and human reasoning.[citation needed] Generalizations posit the existence of a domain or set of elements, as well as one or more common characteristics shared by those elements. As such, it is the essential basis of all or abstract Abstraction is a conceptual process by which higher, more abstract concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts. An "abstraction" (noun) is a concept that acts as super-categorical noun for all subordinate concepts, and connects any related concepts as a group, field, or category 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 headline, heading, head or title of a story; "hed" in journalists' jargon.[2] Rarely a complete sentence (e.g. "Pilot Flies Below Bridges to Save Divers").
Subhead (or dek or deck)
A phrase, sentence or several sentences near the title of an article or story, a quick blurb or article teaser.[2]
Lead or intro
For Wikipedia guidelines on lead paragraphs, see Wikipedia:Lead section.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 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 writers use the spelling lede (pronounced /ˈliːd/), from the archaic English, to avoid confusion with the printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as the most influential event in the second millennium AD, revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe type formerly made from lead Lead is a main-group element with symbol Pb and atomic number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals. Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish color when exposed to air. Lead has a shiny chrome-silver luster when it is melted into a 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" and the inclusion of a full line of space between each line is known as "double spacing", but in page layout software such as.[3])
Charnley[4] states that "an effective lead is a 'brief, sharp statement of the story's essential facts.'"[5] 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 (putting the most important information first - see inverted pyramid section below) applies especially to leads, but the unreadability of long sentences constrains the lead's 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 five Ws In journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws , or Six 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 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(s).
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 Enjoying the attention of others is quite socially acceptable. In some instances, however, the need for attention can lead to difficulties. The term attention seeking is generally reserved for such situations, where excessive and “inappropriate attention seeking” is seen 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).[6]
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 of headline and/or 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 trillion dollars for the project. ...
Nut graph (various spellings)
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 brief paragraphs that summarise the news value of the story, sometimes bullet-pointed and/or set off in a box. The various spellings are contractions of the expression nutshell paragraph. Nut graphs are used particularly in feature stories (see below).
Inverted pyramid
Main article: Inverted pyramid The inverted pyramid is a metaphor used by journalists and other writers to illustrate the placing of the most important information first within a text. It is the most widely preferred method in writing news stories.[citation needed]Journalists usually describe the organization or structure of a news story as an inverted pyramid. The journalist puts the essential and most interesting elements of his or her story at the beginning, 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 explore a topic to only the depth that their curiosity takes them, and without the imposition of details or nuances that they could 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.
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 "Five Ws" 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.[citation needed]
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 The narrative mode is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. The collection of all narrative modes in order to construct a complete narrative is also called the narration (the process of creating the narrative); the terms are sometimes differentiated. It point of view, it's not uncommon for a feature article to slip into first person First-person narrative is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, who explicitly refers to themselves using words and phrases involving "I" and/or "We" (the first-person plural). This allows the reader or audience to see the point of view (including opinions, thoughts, and feelings) only of the. The journalist will often detail his or her interactions with interview Categories: Evaluation methods | Research methods | Reporting | Radio formats | Television genres | Documentary film techniques | Survey methodology 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 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 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
- ^ Bill Parks. "Basic News Writing" (PDF). http://www.ohlone.edu/people/bparks/docs/basicnewswriting.pdf. Retrieved 2009-07-29.
- ^ a b "What the Heck Is a Hed/Dek? Learning the Lingo in Periodical Publishing By Janene Mascarella". Writersweekly.com. 2005-07-20. http://www.writersweekly.com/this_weeks_article/002828_07202005.html. Retrieved 2009-07-29.
- ^ "The Mavens' Word of the Day". Randomhouse.com. 2000-11-28. http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20001128. Retrieved 2009-07-29.
- ^ Charney 1966
- ^ Charney 1966:166
- ^ Unzipped! Newswriting by Chris Kensler
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
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