Nitty gritties of Reporting

Journalism Lectures, Day 9 and 10

2 lecture hours on Reporting and I already feel enlightened! A quick glance at my notebook and I am ready to add one more post to my blog.

The topics that have been touched upon in the last 2 days have been mentioned below.

Day 9: Introduction writing, it's relevance to the "Inverted Pyramid" style of writing, different forms of introduction writing and the structure of a newspaper report.

Day 10:Role of simplicity, sentences, paragraphs, sources of a reporter and litigations.

On Day 9, the "Inverted Pyramid" style of writing was discussed in great details. A newspaper report must include the most important points of a story in the introduction itself. Apart from grabbing the attention of a reader, mentioning the important points of a story in the first paragraph, serves another critical function.

When an editor decides to chop off a few lines from a story filed by the reporter, the person begins his/her way up from the bottom! The last few paragraphs are assumed to be the least important and the editor is unlikely to show any mercy when he has deadlines to meet.

So, there he goes snip, snip, snip- working his way through the report. "The editor has murdered my story", is a common complaint made by most of the reporters when they see their "mutilated story" in next day's newspaper.

More to come later...