The write stuff
This week we'll be advancing from basic interviewing to basic newswriting, but we'll worry less about the writing itself — which we will get to later — and more about choosing what facts to emphasize in our writing.
Before 2 p.m. Sept. 18, thoroughly review the story notes provided and produce a written story emphasizing the most relevant journalistic facts in the most engaging, yet still professional, manner possible. Try to get as many interesting points as possible up high as possible, at the very beginning of your story, and weave the remaining points in later, as you flesh out the piece. The exercise is mainly about how well you can identify things to emphasize and then about how powerfully you can convey those points.
The challenge is to figure out what's most likely to be unusual, interesting or evocative of emotions to your audience and then focus your writing in such a way that those points are what they are conveyed clearly and with impact before additional details are itemized. Keep in mind what we learned by looking at the web metrics of readership from an actual news site and use insights you gleaned from that exercise to help you predict what to emphasize and how to emphasize it.
For purposes of this exercise, imaging you are working on the breaking news desk of any of several Champaign-Urbana news organizations. It could be a newspaper. It could be a radio or television station. It could be something else altogether. We're not concerned with whether you write this is broadcast style, print style or even online style. We do want your story to be grammatical and spelled right, but for this assignment we don't have to use AP style or any other particular writing style other than one that is internally consistent with the basic rules of syntax and grammar.
For a later assignment, we'll work more with specific writing styles and approaches to writing. For now, however, what we're mainly interested in is how well you can find the informational wheat among the chaff and serve it up to your audience in a taut, impactful story that wastes no words while still providing a complete, accurate and not misleading account of what happened.
When finished, print out your story and make a PDF of it. Submit the PDF via the same form you use to answer roll each week, choosing the "Submit first story" item from the pulldown Action menu. Also bring your printout to class. We'll be discussing and critiquing everyone's stories in detail during class.