News Writing

1. The manufacture
of News
Adapted from Reporting Processes and Practices: Newswriting for Today’s Readers
Everette E. Dennis & Arnold H. Ismach
[1981, Wadsworth Publishing Company, California, USA.]

2. conditions, situations and
ideas that developed over time

3. The best censored stories were not published because
they did not fit into traditional definitions of news

4. Deciding what is news is the
most important element in
the journalistic process

5. It determines how reporters and editors work
It determines the nature of information that the public gets
Deciding What’s News

6. • News provides a window on the world, a frame through
which citizens learn about their institutions, their leaders,
other people and themselves
• It provides the raw materials for social discourse, creating
a shared reality for the public
• News brings together information that is otherwise
inaccessible and makes it available to everyone at the
same time
The importance of News
in Society

7. • It enables governments to inform their publics, and
publics to inform their governments
• It focuses public attention and helps set our social and
political agendas

8. • It’s not the equivalent of truth
• It provides essentially superficial knowledge
• It presents “acquaintance with” rather than “knowledge
about” subjects of interest
• It does not involve extensive verification of information
What news isn’t

9. • Newspapers & newscasts lack space for thorough
treatment of most subjects
• Reporters lack the time and knowledge to report in depth
• Readers lack interest
News is superficial
because…

10. Journalists generally agree
about what news isn’t, but
they have real problems
identifying just what news is

11. Deciding what’s news
usually isn’t a matter of
absolutes, but rather of the
relative newsworthiness of
different subjects at a given
time

12. Space, time, and competing
events determine what is
published

13. Political scientist Leon Sigal
suggests that nobody knows
what news is because there
are no universally shared
criteria to define it

14. • “when a dog bites a man, that is not news; but when a
man bites a dog, that is news” [19th century editor, John
Bogart]
• “it is something you didn’t know before, had forgotten, or
didn’t understand” [Turner Catledge, an editor of New
York Times]
• “news is anything that makes a reader say ‘gee whiz’
Traditional definitions of
news

15. • “news is a timely report of facts or opinions that hold
interests or importance, or both, for a considerable
number of people”
• “news is something newspersons know when they see it,
something that scholars ruminate about, something that
public officials try to influence”

16. News must be defined as
a journalistic report that
presents a contemporary
view of reality with
regard to a specific issue,
event or situation or
process [DeFleur and
Dennis,1981]

17. • Timeliness: immediacy of events and interests
• Proximity: geographical & psychological closeness
• Prominence: celebrity or notoriety of individuals, places
or institutions
• Conflict: disagreement, crisis or competition
ELEMENTS OF NEWS

18. • Impact: effect of events, issues, trends &ideas
• Importance: degree to which people need to know about event,
and its significance to society
• Oddity: the unique, the bizarre, the unexpected, the infrequent
• Human interest: the degree to which the event appeals to
emotion or depicts human drama

19. a common thread that runs
through these 8 elements is
‘events’

20. Journalists tend to
concentrate on events
because they are connected
to visible action, rather than
ideas and trends or issues

21. The primary factor in
making news is visibility of
events, ideas, issues and
trends to journalists

22. Organizational factors in News
• Beats
• Deadlines
• Accessibility
• Predictability
• Anticipation of audience interests & acceptance

23. • Traditional news attributes that indicate impact such as
consequence, proximity & utility; attributes that indicate
psychological appeals, such as novelty, prominence,
conflict, drama & human interest; attributes that helps our
understanding such as explanation, interpretation, and
currency
Three principal factors in
editorial decisions

24. • Institutional constraints that act to preserve the security
of the news organization, such as social forces reflecting
bureaucratic influences, socialization of staff members,
mutually accepted techniques of handling news,
limitations imposed by economic and staff resources

25. • Factors that determine audience acceptance of
information, such as knowledge of what interests the
audience.

26. News situation : reader
interests = news value

27. • To keep informed about the world around
• To help make decisions about public affairs
• To provide fodder for social discussions
Readers interests: what
people tend to use
• To feel connected to the outside world
newspapers/TV/Radio for

28. • To obtain tangible information of practical utility
• To reinforce existing beliefs and find out what others
believe
• To provide relaxation and entertainment

29. The cult of objectivity
objectivity is the practice of
reporting facts and opinions
accurately; it is not
concerned with
establishing their
correctness

30. objectivity implies fairness
& impartiality

31. The advent of interpretation
meant that commitment to
objectivity waned

32. objectivity that prevailed in
earlier times gave way to
interpretation today due to:

33. …awareness that it did not
produce fair and truthful
account of the news

34. …the advent of TV quickly
usurped newspapers for
spot news

35. …rapid changes in society
demanded more
backgrounding than
objectivity could provide

36. Today’s blend of objective +
interpretive reporting has
given rise to many story
formats that are not based
events such as….

37. Trend Stories

38. backgrounders

39. analyses

40. think pieces

41. investigative reports

42. multiple-element stories

43. At one time in journalism
there were only two types of
news stories: spot or hard
news and the feature

44. Today, news stories could
be backgrounders,
interpretives or news
analyses and profiles

45. As we have just seen in this
lecture, reporters today
write various types of news
stories other than spot news

46. Jimi Kayode
MAC 203 Foundations of
News Reporting