Week 2 Text
- M: am 1 hour Seminar: Brief Introduction to Journalism — What is Journalism & Who is a Journalist? / 1 hour Critique: Photo Assignment
- M: pm 30 mins Seminar: News Principles / 1 hour Seminar & Exercise: News Values / 1 hour Seminar: News Writing Basics
- T: am 45 mins Seminar: Feature writing basics / 45 mins Exercise: partner story / 45 mins Seminar: Sourcing & Interviews (part 1 TBC in the following intensive week)
- T: pm 45 mins seminar: finding story focus / 15 min Seminar: reporting process / 1 hour Exercise: Report a feature
Assignment:
800 (700–1000 max) word news feature about Chinese graduates facing a tough job market. This is not a new story, but it’s an ongoing and an important one. China’s college graduates reached a record high of 7.49 million this year, up by 220,000 compared with 2014. Meanwhile, sagging economic growth means companies have generally decreased demand for new recruits this year. There’s lot’s of material you can look at for research, but of course we want you to find one or more people to interview to come up with an original and current story. Your interviewee(s) cannot be a direct friend, it can be a friend of a friend, but we’ve given you this assignment as an easy warm up so use it as an opportunity. In the future you’ll need to find, interview and tell stories about strangers. Tell a balanced story on an important issue. Include a single header photo. Imagine you are writing for The Guardian. A news feature is an article that focuses on a topic of interest in the news. News features often cover the same subjects as hard-news stories, but do so in greater depth and detail.
Journalism Basics & Essentials:
So what is Journalism & who are Journalists? Here are a few resources to get you started. Much of this information will be extended and re-enforced through both theory and practice as we work through the terms. Here’s a simple answer on the left and a more complicated answer below.
Here is a really wonderful and thorough collection of guides explaining the basic principles and elements of good journalism. Many of these guides are largely based on the research and teachings of the Committee of Concerned Journalists — a consortium of reporters, editors, producers, publishers, owners and academics.
The Journalism Essentials above is a huge resource, I recommend scanning through and returning to most sections later. But do make sure you read this one this week:
Journalism Principles / Values
Journalism is built on a number of editorial values including accuracy, impartiality, accountability, public interest and independence. The IMMJ recommends and adhere’s to the BBC Academy website ‘Journalism Values’ section. Make sure you watch all films — BBC director of news James Harding outlines why the BBC’s ethics and values underpin everything its journalists do. And senior BBC editors discuss how they put these standards into practice.
Hard news & Features
For the IMMJ-MA We’ll focus on features rather than breaking news. News stories are split into two major categories, spot news and features.
Spot news — aka hard news — stories deliver short, fact-based accounts of important, impacting current events. Features tell stories in more depth and don’t necessarily centre around current events. Features often provide some interpretation of events and are written in a more creative, entertaining style than hard news. Feature writing doesn’t have a clear structure like the inverted pyramid structure of ‘hard’ news writing, and any number of writing structures can be employed. Features include the whole gamut of journalism, from sports to profiles, to explainers, investigations and news features.
Hard news stories generally are written so that the audience gets the most important information as quickly as possible. Feature writers often begin with an anecdote or example designed primarily to draw the audience’s interest, so the story may take longer to get to the central point.
Like all journalism, accuracy, conciseness and fairness are the corner stones of good journalistic writing. Your reporting will need to highlight important topics and engage your audience.
Writing
The writing week, introduces the very basics of journalistic writing, so If you’ve had text reporting training previously, you might skip this chapter. For those without prior training, this week gives a solid basic grounding. Text is a key multimedia skill; you’ll use it singularly, for structuring video and audio scripts or as an integrated part of your multimedia packages.
Do not forget to read the required text book Handbook of Independent Journalism by Deborah Potter. Right now you just need to read chapters 1–3.
Our home made multimediatrain.com site should help you refresh anything you missed in class.
Writing Online
You don’t need to read or think too much about writing online this week — We will cover it next week during the intensive. The guidelines we outline in the writing week apply to both writing for print and online publications, but we’ve also included a few specific tips for writing online too. In the age of multimedia journalism text is delivered on a variety of platforms: print, web, tablet and mobile. Check out the links we’ve provided for further material that will help you consider writing for web and mobile.
Assignment resources:
You don’t need to go through all the resources this week, the most important thing you should be doing however is reading features, it’s impossible to write a feature if you are not critically reading the work of others. There’s plenty of places to start in this section.
Here’s a nice series on features on China’s border provinces. They are quite short and fun to read so good inspiration.
Here’s some more tips and resources…. read at your leisure.
This article below by @taniabranigan has a whole stack of links of her feature writing on China, pick some topics you like and dig in for a good read and some great feature writing examples.
- Feature writing tips from a journalism professor
- This course syllabi on Feature writing: ‘Crafting research-based stories with characters, development and a structural arc’ Has lots of great information
- What Are the Different Kinds of Feature Stories?
- How to Write a Profile Feature Article
- The Power of Leads (Poynter)
And of course READ Plenty of FEATURES! The single two best things you can do to improve your writing, is more reading and more writing. When you read, consider the article carefully, where are the elements lead, nut-graph, quotes and how are they written and used.
- Pulitzer winning feature stories
- Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism (Great features here)
- http://longreads.com/
- http://longform.org/
Editing each others work will also be an enormous learning curve. Not only will you’ll be helping your classmates, you’ll help yourself. Learn to spot mistakes you’d make and avoid them, and become better at improving awkward wording.
This is wonderful from the BBC:
Headlines
Interviews
We’ll focus more on interviews in the future (one step at a time) — but this is really great advice:
