Understanding Journalism: News, Reports, and Structure
The Press News
Journalism has three objectives: to inform, to entertain, and to create opinion. It carries out its tasks through the print media (paper or online), radio, and television. In print, the newspaper is the most prestigious medium of dissemination. General newspapers try every day to provide a comprehensive overview of the most important things happening in the world and in different areas of human life.
Genres of a Story:
- Informational (pretending to report events), e.g., news.
- Opinion (includes the writer’s personal commentary on that information).
The News
The news is a story of a recent event of interest. To be of interest, it must satisfy one of the following factors: timeliness, proximity, significance, rarity, human interest, or relevance of the subject of the news. The news should be objective and should only contain the most relevant data.
It answers who, what, where, when, how, and why.
Parts of the News:
- The Headline: A short phrase whose mission is to attract readers and provide as much information with fewer words. It is distinguished from the rest of the story by the larger font size and visibility (bold). Sometimes, this also includes subtitles expanding on the content of the headline.
- The Intro: This is a summary of the news. It answers the main questions and recounts the most important information. Sometimes, it is written in bold and is separated from the body of the story.
- The Body of the Story: This is the extensive development of the news. All the information available to the journalist is included here. It is written following the inverted pyramid structure, i.e., the information is arranged in autonomous paragraphs of decreasing importance.
Newspaper Reports
The report recounts events of interest around a topic. This is an extended story that allows for a more personal style from the author. The report is the product of thorough investigation and documentation of previous work by the reporter.
It’s a journalistic genre whose interest lies in the treatment of the event by the speaker. The reporter signs his work and suggests some subjectivity. He added data, entered information prior to or after the event.
Reports usually include interviews, photographs, maps, drawings, or graphics that extend the information and arouse the curiosity of the reader. Its size is greater than that of the news.
Combines:
- Journalistic language (simplicity and clarity of information).
- Literary language (more plastic and rhetorical).
- Colloquial language (more personal and informal).
Topics:
- A fact that was news, recent or not, and deserves a deeper and more extensive analysis for its human interest, because of the importance of the event, or the relevance of the main character of the event.
- The issue is more general, and its interest lies in the attraction that the reader may have on the subject.
Feature Structure
The structure of the story is similar to the news. It is organized into four parts:
- Headline: Headlines seek to draw the attention of the receiver using expressive and literary resources.
- The Opening Paragraph: Tends to focus on curious or anecdotal aspects.
- The Body Paragraphs: Include testimonies from witnesses or experts on the subject.
- The Concluding Paragraph: Ends with a reflection that summarizes the contents of the report.