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What is News?
Chapter One
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What is news?
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News a person,
thing, or event considered as a choice
subject for journalistic treatment; newsworthy
material
 the presentation of a report on recent or new
events in a newspaper or other periodical or on
radio or television.
 a report of a recent event; intelligence; information
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Types of News Stories
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Hard News
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Soft News
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serious news of widespread import, concerning politics, foreign
affairs, or the like, as distinguished from routine news items, feature
stories, or human-interest stories.
News, as in a newspaper or television report, that does not deal
with formal or serious topics and events.
Feature Story
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An article not meant to tell breaking news, but to take an in-depth
look at a subject.
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Types cont..
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Entertainment
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Sports
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Journalism that focus on the entertainment business and its products.
Like fashion journalism, entertainment journalism covers industryspecific news while targeting general audiences beyond those working
in the industry itself.
Form of journalism that reports on sports topics and events.
Opinion
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Journalism that makes no claim of objectivity. Although distinguished
from advocacy journalism in several ways, both forms feature a
subjective viewpoint, usually with some social or political purpose.
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What makes something newsworthy?
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Certain steps should be taken to make sure that the content of the
story is newsworthy. Stories should have 2-3 of these qualities to
make the piece newsworthy.
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Timeliness – Did the news event happen recently or was it a long
time ago? For a daily news something that happened last week
would not be as timely as it would be for a magazine that last
published a month a go.
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Impact- This story will create emotion in your reader.
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Cont..
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Proximity- Did the event happen close to here or was it far away?
If you lived in Fort Wayne your local paper wouldn’t write a front
page story about an American Idol contestant from Stanwood,
Washington, unless the contestant had some relationship to Fort
Wayne.
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Controversy- It's human nature to be interested in stories that
involve conflict, tension, or public debate. The content doesn’t
need to be a debate or a disagreement, any type of conflict works.
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Prominence- Is there an important person in the story? A story
about the death of a public official or someone who is a prominent
member of society would probably override a story with less
prominence.
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Cont..
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Currency- Is this event currently happening or are people in the
area talking about this event? If the school board decides to revise
the safety policy of the high school may not attract a whole lot of
attention, but if the board decided to make a revision after a
recent bomb scare or gun incident, that story would.
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Oddity- The extraordinary and the unexpected appeal to our
natural human curiosity. As the saying goes, "If a dog bites a man,
that is not news. But if a man bites a dog, it's news!
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Writing Journalistically.
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News writing attempts to answer all the basic questions about
any particular event in the first two or three paragraphs: Who?
What? When? Where? and Why? and occasionally How?
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Purpose of the journalism is to inform, explain, describe, or define
his or her subject to the reader.
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Objective and Unbiased
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Writing Journalistically..
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Lead Paragraph- The most important structural element of a
story is the lead, the story's first, or leading, sentence. The lead is
usually the first sentence, or in some cases the first two sentences,
and is ideally 20-25 words in length. Answers 5w’s.
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Copy or Body- Paragraphs between the lead and the conclusion.
The body of a story holds the important facts.
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Conclusion- The conclusion paragraph wraps up what was told in
the story and ends the article.
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Cont..
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Inverted pyramid- the style of journalistic writing where all the
important information is at the beginning and works it way down
to the less important information. Mostly used for editing
purposes.