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Showing posts from July, 2016

STRUCTURE OF NEWS DEPARTMENT: Quality of reporter

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One of the traditional mass communications is the presence of a large number of gatekeepers. This fact   is seen in gathering and reporting of news for conventional print and broadcast media. Reporting is a team effort and quite a few members of the team serve as gatekeepers. Online reporting in contrast may have only one or a few gatekeepers. There are two main sources of news; staff reports and the wire services . Other less important sources include feature syndicates as well as handouts and releases from various public and private sources. The City Editor is the captain of the news reporting team. He or she assigns stories to the reporters and supervises their work. There are two types of reporters: Beat Reporters:   Cover some topics on regular basis, such as crime beat or health beat. · General assignment reporters: Cover what ever assignment is given to them or come up. A typical

Writing News Releases

A news release is a short article, usually written in the style of a standard hard-news story,   that is sent to media with the aim of encouraging favourable coverage of the people, company or organization that issued the statement. News releases are also commonly referred to as press releases and media releases . The common news release is the foundation of the public relations business. After all, public relations people and the folks who pay good money to employ them by the thousands recognize that when it comes to selling a product, or a point of view, no publicity is worth more than legitimate news coverage. News releases are often valued more than full-page ads, billboards or paid TV spots. In this regard, all news releases are an effort to influence the media to see a story a particular way. Literally thousands of news releases are sent to media organizations every day, 365 days a year. They come from corporations, governments, sports teams, churches, political par

The Basic Components of a News Story

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All well-written new stories have most of the parts listed below. Most basic news stories should have: - A headline - A lead (sometimes written lede) - A backup quote - Attribution - Reaction - A "nut graph" - Background - An ending 1. The Headline. The headline is a one or two line summary of the contents of the news story, in larger type, that tells readers what the story is about . Headlines act as an index of the contents of the newspaper, and a summary of the information in its stories. 2. The Lead. The lead is usually defined as the first sentence of a news story, sometimes as the first few sentences. The lead is the beginning of a story. The lead on a hard news story is often called a summary lead . Lead should contain the most important facts of the story - at least some of the Five Ws. Most agree that the ideal lead is short - no more than 25 or 30 words. Leads should be "tight" - that is, written with economy. A news story wit