4
Writing in the Media Environment
The news story is one of the basic forms of writing for the mass media. This chapter introduces
the student to the basic content of the news story. The next chapter will introduce the student to
the basic form of the news story.
Key terms and concepts
The following are some key terms and concepts that the student should understand.
News values — News values are the concepts used in making judgments about what events are
news and what events are not news. Traditional news values include conflict, prominence,
impact and currency.
News events will probably have the element of timeliness, but they are unlikely to contain all the
news values listed in the chapter. Very few news stories do that. Consequently, editors and news
directors must decide whether or not enough news values are present in an event — and if they
are present with enough sway — to make that event a news event.
Accuracy — The importance of presenting accurate information is also discussed in this chapter.
You will notice that it isn’t the first time that this subject has been introduced. We have discussed
accuracy at length in previous chapters and will do so again in the next chapter. This emphasis
on accuracy should be pointed out to the students. The need for accuracy is a pervasive one, and
that’s why the topic reappears so much in this book. Those who would work in the mass media
must develop good habits for obtaining accurate information. They should pay attention to the
details of the information they obtain; they must also make sure they understand the significance
and meaning of the information they have. Even in the writing assignments that are included in
this book, the students must be careful in presenting their information. They must make special
efforts to see that the details and the larger ideas are correct.
Links and resources
Deadline pressure. One of the greatest difficulties for a beginning journalism student is writing
with a short deadline. This particular link provides a mental checklist for reporters to consider
when writing under time constraint.
Chapter notes
Plagiarism. Students sometimes get mixed up about what constitutes plagiarism, but journalists
should never let that happen. They should understand that plagiarism is one of the worst things
they can do, and they should know how to avoid it. Here is what the Detroit Free Press has to say
about plagiarism:
Using someone else’s work without attribution —whether deliberately or thoughtlessly—is
a serious ethical breach. Staff members should be alert to the potential for even small,
unintentional acts of plagiarism, especially in the reporting of complicated stories involving
many sources.
Borrowing ideas from elsewhere, however, is considered fair journalistic practice. Problems
arise in the gray areas between the acceptable borrowing of inspiration and the unacceptable
stealing of another’s work. Our standards:
Words directly quoted from sources other than the writer’s own reporting should be
When other work is used as the source of ideas or stylistic inspiration, the result must be
clearly your own work. That is, what is acceptable to learn from another are the elements of
style and approach—tone, rhythm, vocabulary, topic ideas—and not specific words, phrases,
images.
The verb “said.” In journalistic writing, there is no good substitute for the verb “said.” Still,
beginning students are sometimes self-conscious about using “said” so much in their writing, and
they try to find substitutes. The problem with a substitute is that they are laden with added
meanings that the writer may not want to include. For instance, a writer might try to use
“claimed” instead of “said.” Claimed implies doubt — as if to say, he “claimed” he did it, but we’re
not sure. Be care about using verbs of attribution; they may say more than you want to say. Stick
Writing with verbs. Most good writing teachers stress the power and importance of verbs—often
to skeptical students. Verbs are the engines of the language and have far more descriptive power
than adjectives or adverbs. That’s where the skepticism comes in. Students interested in writing
Clichés. One of the most dangerous traps a writer can fall into — especially a beginning writer —
– is the use of clichés. Clichés are overused expressions that have lost their freshness and vitality.
Chances are, if you hear a new expression more than once among your friends, it has already
Scoop crazy. Every good journalist wants a scoop. Working in a world with relatively few
rewards, the journalist seeks the occasional and often Pyrrhic victory of getting a story before
anyone else gets its. Then, if the story is important enough so that other media outlets pick it up,
professional practice demands that the other guys attribute the story to you. It’s their
acknowledgement that, for a brief moment, you’re a better journalist than they are.
To those outside the culture of journalism, or not sympathetic to it, the desire for a scoop may
sound a little crazy. But the desire to be first is a real and effective spur to journalistic practice.
Sometimes, however, it can throw other journalistic practices out of kilter.
The question of deception. When the Spokane Spokesman-Review exposed nefarious behavior on
the part of Spokane’s mayor, the newspaper used some deception in its reporting. The reaction of
many editors would lead you to believe that “Thou shalt never deceive” is one of the most sacred
What wasn’t covered. An interesting article on the Poynter website gathers opinion from a
number of journalism experts about the news media’s performance in 2005. One of the
fascinating things about such assessments are the stories that these experts feel journalists
ignored or provided less than adequate coverage for. Among those mentioned are the Bush
administration’s defense of torture, the rise in gasoline and energy costs, the declining position of
General Motors in the economy, and the cost of housing. Religion columnist Terry Mattingly had
two interesting observations. No top journalist or media organization had paid much attention to
the “Sunni vs. Shiite divide in Iraq,” which will have a great effect on efforts to bring democracy
to that country. Mattingly said he was also surprised by the overly positive coverage of Pope
John Paul II when he died. “When the Pope died, there was little coverage of the strong, strong
hatred of John Paul II in the U.S. Catholic establishment and, especially, in higher education. All
we got was the positive. We needed more balance, to understand the reality facing Catholicism
What everybody talks about. A sidebar in Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How
is titled, “Everybody talks about the weather.” In addition to the weather, what are some of the
other things everybody talks about? One answer would be sports. If you are located close to a
major college or university, you can’t help talking about sports—or hearing a lot about sports. But
The writer’s life, Gay Talese style. For decades now, readers and
critics have focused on Gay Talese’s writing style. In the 1960s he
was a pioneer of the New Journalism, which used fictional and
literary techniques to tell his nonfiction stories. But what readers
should have been focusing on was his reporting, which is
meticulous, exacting and precise. Talese has written his memoir, A
Writer’s Life, which should give us some insight into his reporting
methods. It will be a welcome addition to the literature of Talese and
Exercises
Exercise 4.4
This version shows some of the changes a student might make in this passage.
Exercise 4.5
This version shows some of the changes a student might make in this passage.
Exercise 4.9
This exercise suggests that students select a location and use the functions of Google Maps to
create an informative map that they could use to accompany a story on a news website. As
Question bank
1. Journalists should try to avoid covering topics
2. The journalistic method is designed to find facts, assess them and report them to a wider
audience.
3. If a person takes a trip across the country, it’s probably not news. If the president of the United
States takes a trip across the country, chances are you will hear about it on news broadcasts and
read about it in the newspaper. What news value is at work here?
4. If a traffic accident kills two people but it happens 1,000 away from where you are, you
probably won’t read about it in the local newspaper. If it happens within your city limits,
however, it will be in the newspaper. What news value is at work here?
5. What is the best explanation of the news value of impact?
6. In most news stories, most of the information is likely to come from what type of source?
7. Information from personal sources in a news story usually comes in the form of a direct or
indirect quote.
8. Stored sources are located only in local libraries.
9. One of the most important things a reporter must do is spell the names of people correctly.
10. The best news stories should come from
11. To the working journalist, what is more important?
12. One thing that every media writer must deal with is
13. Police records, articles from a magazine and a press release are what types of sources?
14. All the efforts of a writer for the mass media should be
15. When you are gathering information for a news story, you should
16. If you have a tape recorder during an interview, you don’t need to take notes.
17. You should never ask someone how to spell his or her name; that might offend the source.
18. Journalists are on solid ethical ground in accepting gifts from their sources.
19. Journalists do not need to make any special efforts to keep their biases out of their writing.
20. Reporters do not have the final say over their stories or how the stories are used; editors do.
21. In an interview, an open-ended question — as opposed to a closed-ended question —
22. When a reporter attends an event and writes a story based on what he or she sees, we say the
reporter is using
23. One good source for getting background information on a person that you may be writing
about is