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JRN 260 – News Writing & ReportingRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorSpring 2017/ News Values
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● A broad category of terms determine whether a story is news or not.
● The number varies but under a broad conceptualization, there are 10 values that determine, either alone or in connection with other values, that whether a story is news or not.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Immediacy
● Proximity
● Consequence
● Conflict
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Oddity
● Sex
● Emotion
● Prominence
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Suspense
● Progress
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● If any one of these elements is present, a story has news value. However, many stories contain more than one element.
● The top concern should be to develop an understanding of what constitutes an interesting news story.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● If it is interesting to you, chances are that it is interesting to others.
● Remember what Dr. Pinker said in his lecture: complexity often gets in the way of clarity of language.
● The same happens in developing ideas for stories.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● A story that has just happened is news; one that happened a few days ago is history. Immediacy is timeliness.
● Few events of major significance can stand up as news if they fail to meet the test of timeliness; however, an event that occurred some time ago may still be timely if it has just been revealed.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Readers are interested in what happens close to them.
● Proximity is the nearness of an event to the readers or listeners and how closely it touches their lives.
● People are interested mainly in themselves, their families, their friends, and their hometowns.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● News of change or news that affects human relations is news of consequence.
● The more people affected, the greater the news value.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Sporting events, wars and revolutions are the most common examples of conflict in the news.
● People may be pitted against people, team against team, nation against nation or humans against the natural elements.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● The unusual or strange event will help lift a story out of the ordinary. If an ordinary pilot parachuted out of an ordinary plane with an ordinary parachute and makes an ordinary landing, there is no real news value.
● It is news if the aviator has only one leg; or if the parachute fails to open and the pilot lands safely.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Sometimes sex is the biggest single element in news, or at least it appears to be the element that attracts readers the most.
● Consider all the stories in papers that involve men and women—sports, financial news, society and crime. It concerns is only if the person is a public figure.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● The emotional element, sometimes called the human-interest element, covers all the feelings that human beings have, including happiness, sadness, anger, sympathy, ambition, hate, love, envy, generosity and humor.
- Emotion is comedy; emotion is tragedy; it is the interest we have in each other.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● Prominence is a one-word way of saying “names make news.” When a person is prominent, like the President of the United States, almost anything he does is newsworthy—even his church attendance.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● The suspense element is increasingly present in our social media and cable television consumption.
● It is a day-by-day or hour-by-hour account of some high-visibility event that is often available online.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
News Values
● In a technologically advanced society, we are interested in gadgets, medicine and stuff that allegedly makes life better. It is known as progress.
● Anything new in a technological sense is progress.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● How do you identify a subject for a long-form or small-scale piece of reporting?
● How do you know if long-form is the appropriate genre for the information or whether a blurb will do?
● How do you know what is appropriate?
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist● Here are checklists of tactics designed to
facilitate decisions on what to pursue in terms of subject and how to pursue it in terms of writing.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● First, understand that stories are all around us.
● The reason people like stories because they often see their lives in terms of the classic narrative arc identified by Aristotle in Poetics.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist ● In journalism, stories are written not for dramatic
emphasis, though, but for information.
● The most important information is listed first, followed by amplification and secondary information along an arc.
● We call this Who/What/When/Where/How/Why.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● That’s the first checklist.
● Does the story have a compelling narrative arc that can be clearly identified?
● In short, is it a story worth reading?
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● "The idea is everything. If the idea is crappy, the story is mediocre at best. The idea has to have some action. There’s got to be something at stake. Most people try to do too much. If you don’t narrow it down, it’s hard to go deep enough to show how they’re changing over time.” — Kelley Benham French
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● One of the great factual writers of the past 50 years is John McPhee.
● When he started writing, he simply asked friends for ideas on things to write about.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● "When I was starting out, I said to friends, I’m looking for ideas. And a high-school friend named Bob VanDeventer said, Why don’t you write about the Pine Barrens? And I said, The what? I was born and raised in New Jersey, but I’d never heard of them …
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● "So VanDeventer starts telling me about the pines, and how there were holes in the ground that had no bottom. And that the people who lived there were odd, to put it mildly. He had a whole lot of things that he had learned somewhere about the Pine Barrens, and with respect for my good friend Bob, all of these things were wrong …
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● “But what he did was light the spark. It was in New Jersey, and it related to the woods, two things that I was interested in.”
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● McPhee said there are “zillions of ideas out there—they stream by like neutrons.”
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● But where to begin?
● Start with what’s known as a small-scale narrative.
● That’s a story between 500 and 1,000 words, tops.
● But it holds an entire universe in that format.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● A long-form story requires deeper, more expansive reporting.
● Think of it as novel versus the shorter small-scale narrative form.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Whether long-form of small-scale, deeply reported and observed stories require a reporting process that can be outlined by a checklist.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Here it is, with pieces contributed by Steve Buttry and Henry Miller:
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Ideas- Move beyond meetings/routine.- Move beyond the mainstream.- Move beyond what others see to what you
see.- Study your visible universe.- Peak around and behind that universe of
experiences.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Ideas- “Keep Human, Go Places … “ (Miller)
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Reporting Technique- Find the full story through reporting.
* Take detailed notes of observations.- Take a fresh approach to reporting.
- Find (and then personify) statistics.- Find experts/studies/academic/archival
stuff.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Reporting Technique- Compile the totality of information about a
story’s subject.- Interview as many people connected to the
subject as possible. When you hear a story for the third time, you’ve heard it all.
JRN 260 – News Writing & Reporting
Checklist
● Writing Technique- Then tell story honestly. - Write first – always. (Miller)- Create a new checklist of verification.