News Writing-Anna Mckane.Pdf

McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page i News Writing McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page ii McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page iii News Writing Anna McKane SAGE Publications London ●●Thousand Oaks New Delhi McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page iv © Anna McKane 2006 First published 2006 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 1-4129-1914-2 ISBN-13 978-1-4129-1914-2 ISBN-10 1-4129-1915-0 (pbk) ISBN-13 978-1-4129-1915-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2006924529 Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wiltshire Printed on paper from sustainable resources McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page v CONTENTS Foreword vii Preface ix Acknowledgements xi 1 What Makes News? 1 2 Gathering the News 16 3 The Intro 27 4 Structure Part 1: The Inverted Pyramid 46 5 Structure Part 2: The News Story as Answers 57 6 Structure Part 3: Avoiding Narrative 68 7 Other News Writing Models for Intros 77 8 Accuracy 85 9 The Language of News 1: Choosing the Right Words 94 10 The Language of News 2: Sentence Structure, Brevity and Clarity 105 11 The Language of News 3: Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation 113 12 Subbing and Presentation: The View from the Bridge by Christopher McKane, Executive Editor, The Times 141 13 Other Models Used on News Pages 148 McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page vi vi NEWS WRITING Epilogue 162 Further Reading 163 Glossary 165 Appendix: News Stories in the National Press July 18/19 2005 171 Index 195 McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page vii FOREWORD The final stage of the journalistic process, the only one the audience encounters directly, is the words. They may be printed, spoken, or placed on a computer screen, but first they have to be prepared, and that usually means written. If they are boring, they will bore. If they are incomprehensible, they will not be under- stood. If they are clumsy, or illiterate, or ungrammatical, or inappropriate, they will annoy. No matter how good the reporting, how dramatic the revelation, how brave, despicable, corrupt, extraordinary or inspirational the events described, if the writing does not engage the audience all that came before it is wasted. Keith Waterhouse, in his Waterhouse on Newspaper Style (Viking, 1989, now sadly out of print), still one of the best books on newspaper writing there is, lamented the decline of written English as practised by the “new mass middle class”. In his book, which started life in 1979 as an in-house style guide for Daily Mirror journalists, he reflects: “Middle class tastes, never very high, are lowering all the time under the influence of the mass media and consumer advertising and with the decline in educational standards. Good prose is not a first requirement; a good home computer page is.” Good prose, good news writing, can be taught. And needs to be. Most journalists today emerge from journalism courses where the reporting skills are taught. The most demanding of these is writing, and most of us in journalism education find there is a lot of time-consuming work to be done in this area. However bright the students, learning how to write for publication is challenging. The easiest thing is to give them examples of bad writing: bureaucratese; police speak; letters from banks and local authorities; wriggling defences from the providers of goods and services. Some of the worst comes in internal communication with companies and organisations. Sadly one cannot exclude the academy. In an age when the word communication is a cliché, and we have allegedly never done more of it, the language is seldom fit for purpose. Jargon and obfuscation reign. Journalism’s role is to inform, and a by-product of that is that journalism’s job is to look after the means of doing that, the language, the writing. Anna McKane makes her daily contribution to that in her teaching, her rigorous, McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page viii viii FOREWORD repetitive insistence on high standards. I have seen it at close hand, the devices she employs, her patient explanation of what the student could do to make it better, her ability to disguise pedantry (not a pejorative, in my book, where news writing is concerned) through clever examples. This book shares all that with a wider audience. Employers talk constantly of their need for clear, organised prose. These are not just media employers. Journalism students leave their courses, or should, with that most transferable of transferable skills, the ability to put it across con- cisely and accessibly. It equips them for a wide range of employment. For journalists it is, simply, the most vital tool. It is why, for all their faults, newspapers serve the language, use the language effectively, more than most that is written. For them it is entirely pragmatic and commercial. It all comes down to readability. Does good writing sell? I don’t know. But if the writing grabs the reader, makes them want to read on, makes them enjoy what they are reading, then that writing certainly sells. And is probably good writing. Peter Cole Professor of Journalism, University of Sheffield McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page ix PREFACE This book derives from my 20 years as a full-time journalist, mainly for Reuters, and my 12 years teaching at City University, where I have developed a news writing course based on my professional work. I believe that the ability to write an accurate and lively news story is the cor- nerstone of a successful career as a journalist. Of course plenty of people want to become feature writers, sub-editors, or commissioning editors. But even for them, I think the ability to spot the news angle in an event, and order the mate- rial to make a coherent news story, is fundamental, and those skills will be use- ful in every other area of journalism. Feature writers may well need some news writing techniques for some types of feature, and subs and other editors will need to be able to spot when someone else’s story is a good or a bad one. There are plenty of good books about interviewing, and plenty which cover the problems and pitfalls of reporting, but I have not found one which covers in a detailed step by step approach how to write a basic news story. If an inexperienced journalist follows through this book, she will end up with a publishable story. Chapter 1 gives some guidance on how to recognise a news story, and how to work out whether it is right for your publication. We did a detailed analysis of the national newspapers over two days to back up the ideas I already had about the two elements which are in almost every news story: conflict and people. Chapter 2 covers the pitfalls and problems associated with gathering the news. The actual craft of reporting, research and interviewing, are outside the scope of this book, and there are several others which cover these areas. Some are listed in Appendix 2. Chapter 3 explains how to write a basic hard news intro (meaning introduction, the first paragraph) with examples and explanations of why certain approaches work better than others. I have found that with an hour to write a short story of about 200 words, an inexperienced reporter needs to spend almost 20 min- utes on the first sentence. If that is right, the rest of the story will fall into place. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 all cover the structure of the story. The first sets out and illustrates the inverted pyramid, which is used in most journalism training to illus- trate the way a news story is structured. Chapters 5 and 6 derive from my teaching: I have developed the ‘news story as answers’ idea, as another way to try to help students work out what piece of information to put into each paragraph. McKane-Prelims.qxd 10/19/2006 5:09 PM Page x x PREFACE Chapter 6, ‘Avoiding Narrative’, was also developed from my teaching, when I discovered that sometimes when writing a complicated story about a chain of events, the students end up with a narrative rather than a news story. Chapter 7 covers other news writing models, and Chapter 8 discusses the all important need for accuracy. Chapters 9 and 10 deal with language. Chapter 10 gives advice on tight writing. Avoiding unnecessary words is essential in journalism, and is of great value in every other kind of writing as well.

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