This week, my JN1001 class discussed the fundamentals of reporting print
and news online. It was a great lecture to refresh and cover topics that were completely
new to me. The format of the discussion was made up to two parts: (1) writing
for the web and (2) writing beyond the inverted pyramid.
The first thing which a news writer must keep in his/her mind while
writing a news story is that the news must be factual, objective and the
language employed must be not flowery. We discussed many other ways to be true
to the story and dig deeper, without being nosey. Many other simple, obvious
news writing styles were explained including how to quote someone. For instance,
"I love studying at James Cook University," Bob said, the person's
name is followed by 'said'.
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| Figure 1: Inverted Pyramid |
For the last few weeks, we have been learning about the 'inverted
pyramid' style of writing. Despite the medium or format, the 'inverted pyramid'
involved discussing the news first; this is the difference between a story and
a news story. A story starts at the beginning and works its way to the end
whilst a news story starts at or near to the end and towards backwards to the
beginning. The 'inverted pyramid' structure is made up of three parts:
beginning, middle and end.
We
also discussed ‘grey areas’ of interviewing- when conducting an interview;
journalists must legally inform the interviewee when they are being recorded,
or when what they are saying will be used in a story. Marie explained that in
some cases, interviewees will provide a ‘background’ for the story, which they
may say ‘off the record,’ but will still give the journalist key understanding of
the issue, although they cannot use it directly in their story.
Half way through the semester and we have already learnt so much. I
cannot wait to see what we learning in the remaining weeks.
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