I Adore...Week Four!

Monday, Sept. 14 – HOW TO WRITE NEWS I

How news content is written
What makes news—news? Well, there are several traditional ‘news values’ that help us know when a story is worth writing about, including:
-Timeliness of the incident. For example, once Oregon State beats Cincinnati this weekend at football (I’m crossing my fingers…), there will be a number of news stories written in the next 24 hours about their glorious victory.
-The impact/consequences. After the Beavers beat the Bearcats by a whopping 40 points, they will be ranked in the top 25 in the country! Not exactly surprising, but still news worthy.
-Prominence of people involved. Jaquizz Rogers, our 5’6’’ running back and former PAC-10 offensive player of the year is a national hero. Inevitably, everyone in the country will be reading about him after he destroys the Bearcats.
-Conflict. The Beaver’s will trounce them. Period. The only news story focusing on ‘conflict’ that could be written would be about the Bearcat’s players fighting over tissues to wipe away their tears.
-Unusual Nature. Professor Eisman gave the example that a ‘dog biting a man isn’t news, but a man biting a dog-NOW THAT’S NEWS!’
-Proximity of Readers. The Corvallis Gazette Times will cover different aspects of the game in at least three or four articles, whereas the Ney York Times might only cover the game in two.
-Interest or Novelty. These could include public service announcements about floods, storm warnings, etc.
In other words…News stories are written for: relevance, usefulness, and interest

Structures of News Stories
I: The News: Who?/What?/Where?/When?/Why?/How?
II: The secondary news; important details that were not included in the lead.
III: More information and evidence about the story
IV: Either quotes or context about the story
VI: Conclusion

Exercise on leads, collect Lincoln homework
Writers should develop an attractive lead. A lead could be: a summary, one side of a debate (followed by the other side of the debate later in the story), or an expert’s view of what happened.
The class proceeded to do an exercise on leads, and Professor Eisman collected our Lincoln homework.


Thursday Sept. 17 – HOW TO WRITE NEWS II

Grammar/News Quiz
We started class with a grammar/news Quiz. From now on, we should expect random news quizzes! To study, know all of the main, headline stories out of the on the Washington Post and CNN. A great way to stay caught up on the news is to set Google News as your homepage. It isn’t biased (like the Huffington Post, Politico, or the Drudge Report), and it presents links to several different articles.

Lessons learned from the Lincoln Assignment:
Then, Professor Eisman returned the Lincoln assignment. The students reviewed their scores, and asked Professor Eisman a number of questions. The lessons learned from the assignment were:
-When starting a new quote, it can be used within a pre-existing paragraph.
-say: 4 million, instead of four million. When describing a number in the millions, use the #. It is one of those weird grammar rules we have all come to love so much
- Attribute statistics-ALL THE TIME! Never trust a statistic without a source, and expect your audience to think the same way.
-Try to break up long quotes and insert a ‘said so-and-so,’ at natural breaks so it is easier to read. For example: “As soon as I looked up,” said Bearcat’s quarterback Tony Pike, “I was immediately smashed to the ground by the Beaver defenders.”

Quote Notes:
-Paraphrase long quotes.
-Use correct punctuation inside of quotation marks.
-Do no convict a criminal before his trial. (Unless he is OJ Simpson…)
-Follow AP Style (duh!)
-Do not back into a sentence with a prepositional phrase. Sadly, I do this all the time. Prepositions are used to indicate location. Examples are: with, on, in, at, etc. Writing a sentence like: “At the twenty yard line, he dropped the football” is worse than re-arranging it and writing it like this: “He dropped the football at the twenty yard line.” The second example is more active and direct, and therefore superior. You want active, direct sentences in news stories, so avoid beginning sentences with prepositional phrases.

Homework for next week: Read the three articles that Professor Eisman sent us via email to prepare for the guest speaker.

And that, my friends, is the week review. See you guys Monday!