yearbook final_review 2015
Be able to list and explain the 5 W''s and H
The Five "W"s and the "H"
This is the crux of all news - you need to know five things:
Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
Any good news story provides answers to each of these questions. You must drill these into your brain and they must become second nature.
For example, if you wish to cover a story about a local sports team entering a competition you will need to answer these questions:
- Who is the team? Who is the coach? Who are the prominent players? Who are the supporters?
- What sport do they play? What is the competition?
- Where is the competition? Where is the team normally based?
- When is the competition? How long have they been preparing? Are there any other important time factors?
- Why are they entering this particular competition? If it's relevant, why does the team exist at all?
- How are they going to enter the competition? Do they need to fundraise? How much training and preparation is required? What will they need to do to win?
Journalism is the activity of gathering, assessing, creating, and presenting news and information. It is also the product of these activities.
That value flows from its purpose, to provide people with verified information they can use to make better decisions, and its practices, the most important of which is a systematic process – a discipline of verification – that journalists use to find not just the facts, but also the “truth about the facts.”
Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth
This “journalistic truth” is a process that begins with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts. Then journalists try to convey a fair and reliable account of their meaning, subject to further investigation.
Journalists should be as transparent as possible about sources and methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information.
The publisher of journalism – whether a media corporation answering to advertisers and shareholders or a blogger with his own personal beliefs and priorities — must show an ultimate allegiance to citizens. They must strive to put the public interest – and the truth – above their own self-interest or assumptions.
Its essence is a discipline of verification
Journalists rely on a professional discipline for verifying information.
While there is no standardized code as such, every journalist uses certain methods to assess and test information to “get it right.”
Being impartial or neutral is not a core principal of journalism. Because the journalist must make decisions, he or she is not and cannot be objective. But journalistic methods are objective.
When the concept of objectivity originally evolved, it did not imply that journalists were free of bias. It called, rather, for a consistent method of testing information – a transparent approach to evidence – precisely so that personal and cultural biases would not undermine the accuracy of the work. The method is objective, not the journalist.
Seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment, all signal such standards. This discipline of verification is what separates journalism from other forms of communication such as propaganda, advertising, fiction, or entertainment.
Journalism should also attempt to fairly represent varied viewpoints and interests in society and to place them in context rather than highlight only the conflicting fringes of debate. Accuracy and truthfulness also require that the public discussion not neglect points of common ground or instances where problems are not just identified but also solved.
Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news
The average person now, more than ever, works like a journalist.
Writing a blog entry, commenting on a social media site, sending a tweet, or “liking” a picture or post, likely involves a shorthand version of the journalistic process. One comes across information, decides whether or not it’s believable, assesses its strength and weaknesses, determines if it has value to others, decides what to ignore and what to pass on, chooses the best way to share it, and then hits the “send” button.
Though this process may take only a few moments, it’s essentially what reporters do.
Two things, however, separate this journalistic-like process from an end product that is “journalism.” The first is motive and intent. The purpose of journalism is to give people the information they need to make better decisions about their lives and society. The second difference is that journalism involves the conscious, systematic, application of a discipline of verification to produce a “functional truth,” as opposed to something that is merely interesting or informative. Yet while the process is critical, it’s the end product – the “story” – by which journalism is ultimately judged.
Today, when the world is awash in information and news is available any time everywhere, a new relationship is being formed between the suppliers of journalism and the people who consume it.
The new journalist is no longer a gatekeeper who decides what the public should and should not know. The individual is now his or her own circulation manager and editor. To be relevant, journalists must now verify information the consumer already has or is likely to find and then help them make sense of what it means and how they might use it.
Thus, write Kovach and Rosenstiel, “The first task of the new journalist/sense maker is to verify what information is reliable and then order it so people can grasp it efficiently.” A part of this new journalistic responsibility is “to provide citizens with the tools they need to extract knowledge for themselves from the undifferentiated flood or rumor, propaganda, gossip, fact, assertion, and allegation the communications system now produces.”
What makes a good story?
A good story is about something the audience decides is interesting or important. A great story often does both by using storytelling to make important news interesting.
The public is exceptionally diverse. Though people may share certain characteristics or beliefs, they have an untold variety of concerns and interests.
So anything can be news. But not everything is newsworthy. Journalism is a process in which a reporter uses verification and storytelling to make a subject newsworthy.
At its most basic level, news is a function of distribution -– news organizations (or members of the public) create stories to pass on a piece of information to readers, viewers, or listeners.
A good story, however, does more than inform or amplify. It adds value to the topic.
The Black Box system for organizing a story
Len Reed, environment and science team leader at The Oregonian, developed a system to help reporters handle unruly information.
The Black Box helps reporters sort through and prioritize the information they have and quickly and clearly make the case for their stories to editors. With the system, writing a story is essentially boiled into four phases:
1. Reporting phase
- Gather
- Search
- Ask
- Interview
- Sort
2. Black Box phase
- What is this information?
- What does it mean?
- What does it signify?
- What is the headline?
- What is the lead?
- What is its context – with what does it connect?
- So what?
- Who cares?
- How can you quickly tell it to the clueless and make it count?
3. Editor phase
- Succinctly tell your editor what the story says.
- Tell your editor the headline that captures the story.
- Be prepared to defend your thinking.
4. Writing phase
- You’ve got a lead; now order a sequence in telling: organize.
- Write quickly, staying on track – you can go back and tweak.
- As you write, periodically ask yourself: Who cares?
- As you write, periodically frighten yourself: The audience is leaving.
- When you finish, go back and ruthlessly cut words and sentences.
Before last reading, say “no one cares”; let the story change your mind.
