News Writing

An Introduction

Facts are in descending order of importance

Leads• Leads are the beginning

sentence of an article, whose purpose is to make a reader want to complete the article

News Leads

• State who and what in 35 words or less

• Where, when, why and how are stated lower in the story

How to Determine if News is Valuable

• Impact

•Conflict

•Novelty

•Prominence

•Proximity

•Timeliness

IMPACT

• How many of our readers will be affected?

• Two – we may need to use the space for something affecting more readers

• Two Hundred – probably important to most of the people who read the WT

CONFLICT

• What is at stake?

• Homecoming Changes – is that a conflict people might be interested in?

• Sarah Palin – do her family problems concern you?

NOVELTY

• Is the topic different or unique to anything we have done before?

• Do we really need to read all the letters in a word, or just the first and last?

• Is Joe getting kicked out of class different or same old?

PROMINENCE

• Name Recognition

• Michael Jordan

vs.

• Matt Walls

PROXIMITY

• How near or close is the destination?

• Le Center

vs.

• Leiden

TIMELINESS

• How recent or prevalent is the topic?

• Some topics are still important even though they may have happened two

weeks ago.

• Others are no longer important, even though they happened yesterday.

• In our case, it is usually a week from writing to distribution.

Assignment

• Write a news article for the Wildcat TalesYou will be evaluated on:

- Lead- Inverted pyramid- News Value Criteria- Headline

Due at the end of the day Thursday. Must be in Journalism folder.