See that diagram? It tells you everything you need to know about how to write a news story. It’s not that hard to learn!
Ah… Four years in journalism school, all sorts of courses… and more and more of ’em can’t write a coherent news story to save their lives.
At best they invert the inverted pyramid and get lost in more or less trivial details before they get anywhere near the point of the article… if there is a point. They use the headline to capture your attention; but how many paragraphs do you have to wade through before you find any mention of the subject touted by the headline?
It’s getting harder and harder to find out “what’s really happening”–which is what newspapers and other news media were supposed to tell you. Sometimes it’s because they’re too prejudiced to tell the truth. But very often it’s because newsies have never learned how to write news.
I took no journalism courses. Zero. I got a job with a weekly newspaper, Tempo Today, and it only took the editor a couple of hours to teach me how to write a news article. Again, it’s not that hard! But they carry on out there like it was rocket science.
Any reasonably intelligent person can learn how to be a news reporter. How it ever became such a rare skill is more than I know.
The handful of news stories I see are so poorly written that I rarely finish the story. Headlines are frequently misleading.
I can’t imagine what they teach them in journalism school.
You’re assuming, of course, that the media employees WANT their readers to know what’s actually happening. That may be a mistaken assumption. 🙄
More than just a possibility, I’m afraid.
One of my many beefs in life are article headlines that do no deliver what they say – especially videos because they take longer to go over than reading. I hate wasting my time of irrelevancy when there is so much relevant knowledge to be attained.
Journalism has greatly deteriorated since I was a reporter.