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Fill in the gaps in the sentences with the correct forms of the words from the table.
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Reading
· Before you read:
ü Think and discuss with your partner, what has been the most important news in your country recently? What made this news so interesting (exciting) for the community (nation)?
ü Can you imagine a fact that will probably become the top news for a small local community? A big city? A whole nation?
What is News?
The answer to the question “What is news?” may seem obvious. News is what is new; it’s what’s happening. Look it up in the dictionary, and you’ll find news described as “a report of recent events or previously unknown information.” But most of the things that happen in the world every day don’t find their way into the newspaper or onto the air in a newscast.
So what makes a story newsworthy enough to be published or broadcast? The real answer is, it depends on a variety of factors. Generally speaking, news is information that is of broad interest to the intended audience, so what’s big news in Buenos Aires may not be news at all in Baku. Journalists decide what news to cover based on many of the following “news values”:
Timeliness
Did something happen recently or did we just learn about it? If so, that could make it newsworthy. The meaning of “recently” varies depending on the medium, of course. For a weekly news magazine, anything that happened since the previous edition the week before may be considered timely. For a 24-hour cable news channel, the timeliest news may be “breaking news,” or something that is happening this very minute and can be covered by a reporter live at the scene.
Impact
Are many people affected or just a few? Contamination in the water system that serves your town’s 20,000 people has impact because it affects your audience directly. A report that 10 children were killed from drinking polluted water at a summer camp in a distant city has impact too, because the audience is likely to have a strong emotional response to the story. The fact that a worker cut a utility line is not big news, unless it happens to cause a blackout across the city that lasts for several hours.
Proximity
Did something happen close to home, or did it involve people from here? A plane crash in Chad will make headlines in N'Djamena, but it’s unlikely to be front-page news in Chile unless the plane was carrying Chilean passengers.
Controversy
Are people in disagreement about this? It’s human nature to be interested in stories that involve conflict, tension, or public debate. People like to take sides, and see whose position will prevail. Conflict doesn’t always entail pitting one person’s views against another. Stories about doctors battling disease or citizens opposing an unjust law also involve conflict.
Prominence
Is a well-known person involved? Ordinary activities or mishaps can become news if they involve a prominent person like a prime minister or a film star. That plane crash in Chad would make headlines around the world if one of the passengers were a famous rock musician.
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Currency
Are people here talking about this? A government meeting about bus safety might not draw much attention, unless it happens to be scheduled soon after a terrible bus accident. An incident at a football match may be in the news for several days because it’s the main topic of conversation in town.
Oddity
Is what happened unusual? As the saying goes, “If a dog bites a man, that is not news. But if a man bites a dog, it's news!” The extraordinary and the unexpected appeal to our natural human curiosity.
What makes news also depends on the makeup of the intended audience, not just where they live but who they are. Different groups of people have different lifestyles and concerns, which make them interested in different types of news. A radio news program targeted at younger listeners might include stories about music or sports stars that would not be featured in a business newspaper aimed at older, wealthier readers. A weekly magazine that covers medical news would report on the testing of an experimental drug because the doctors who read the publication presumably would be interested. But unless the drug is believed to cure a well-known disease, most general-interest local newspapers would ignore the story. The exception might be the newspaper in the community where the research is being conducted.
News organizations see their work as a public service, so news is made up of information that people need to know in order to go about their daily lives and to be productive citizens in a democracy. But most news organizations also are businesses that have to make a profit to survive, so the news also includes items that will draw an audience: stories people may want to know about just because they’re interesting. Those two characteristics need not be in conflict. Some of the best stories on any given day, in fact, are both important and interesting. But it’s fairly common for news organizations to divide stories into two basic categories: hard news and soft news, also called features.
Types of News
Hard news is essentially the news of the day. It’s what you see on the front page of the newspaper or the top of the Web page, and what you hear at the start of a broadcast news report. For example, war, politics, business, and crime are frequent hard news topics. A strike announced today by the city’s bus drivers that leaves thousands of commuters unable to get to work is hard news. It’s timely, controversial, and has a wide impact close to home. The community needs the information right away, because it affects people’s daily lives.
By contrast, a story about a world-famous athlete who grew up in an orphanage would fit the definition of soft news. It’s a human-interest story involving a prominent person and it’s an unusual story that people likely would discuss with their friends. But there’s no compelling reason why it has to be published or broadcast on any particular day. By definition, that makes it a feature story. Many newspapers and online-news sites have separate feature sections for stories about lifestyles, home and family, the arts, and entertainment. Larger newspapers even may have weekly sections for specific kinds of features on food, health, education, and so forth.
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Topic isn’t the only thing that separates hard news from features. In most cases, hard news and soft news are written differently. Hard news stories generally are written so that the audience gets the most important information as quickly as possible. Feature writers often begin with an anecdote or example designed primarily to draw the audience’s interest, so the story may take longer to get to the central point.
Some stories blend these two approaches. Stories that are not time-sensitive but that focus on significant issues are often called “news features.” A story about one community’s struggle to deal with AIDS, for example, is a news feature. A story about a new treatment option for AIDS patients would be hard news. News features are an effective way to explore trends or complex social problems by telling individual human stories about how people experience them.
From the Handbook of Independent Journalism
By Deborah Potter
Deborah Potter is executive director of NewsLab, an online resource center for journalists in Washington, D.C., that she founded in 1998. She has taught journalism as a faculty member at The Poynter Institute and at American University, and spent more than 20 years in TV news, including 16 as a network correspondent for CBS News and CNN
· Having read the text
ü Essential vocabulary
ü Look back at the news you discussed before reading. Analyze them from the point of timeliness, impact, proximity, controversy, prominence, currency and oddity. Do you think that the news you were speaking about really deserved the place on the front pages?
ü Read the following clips:
| The head of the UN nuclear watchdog has called for strengthened international safety checks to help prevent a repeat of nuclear crises. The official said UN experts should be able to carry out random reviews of nuclear power stations. He has also called for countries to carry out risk assessments on their reactors within 18 months. The watchdog, the IAEA, is holding a meeting in Vienna aimed at improving nuclear safety. (BBC News) |
| A 4-year-old girl was handed over to the wrong parents from the play area of an Ikea store in Uppsala in eastern Sweden on Sunday. "I don't understand how something like this can happen," the girl's mother, Lena Norman, told TV4 news. Lena, her husband Rickard, and their 4-year-old daughter Wilma had taken a trip to the popular discount furniture retailer for a day of shopping. After making their way through the store, Lena and Rickard returned to the play area to pick up Wilma only to discover in horror that she wasn't there… (The Local Sweden’s News) |
| Tiny Bulgarian girl Tinka A. gave birth last month to her third child, son Dinko, just 23 months after she first became a mother. She was still playing with dolls when she met husband Biser — nine years her senior — aged 13. The pregnant youngster was forced to leave school, married at 14, and now lives in poverty on a cattle farm central Bulgaria, 30 miles from her parents. She spends her days looking after baby Dinko, daughter Naska, two, and son Gospodin, one. The legal age for sex and marriage in Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007, is 16 — the same as the UK… (The Sun) |
ü Discuss the following questions:
1. What sort of audience would be interested in such news?
2. Are all the facts mentioned in the articles newsworthy and important?
3. Which article would you call ‘a human interest story’? Why?
4. If you were given an assignment to write an article about the Bulgarian girl, what problems would you play up? Why?
ü Grammar
Words borrowed from classical Greek and Latin have tended to keep their foreign plurals in English longer than most other foreign borrowings. Fill in the right column of the table to check if you remember the correct plural forms of the following words. Use your dictionary.
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| singular | Plural |
| alumnus | |
| analysis | |
| basis | |
| thesis | |
| stimulus | |
| nucleus | |
| syllabus | |
| medium | |
| curriculum | |
| datum | |
| phenomenon |
Fill in the gaps in the sentences with the correct forms of the words from the table.
1. The __________of this University take part in the conference together with the students and the University faculty.
2. An event is newsworthy if it happened recently. The meaning of “recently” varies depending on the ___________, of course.
3. English is the one compulsory foreign language on the university_______.
4. If this tax were abolished, it would act as a _______to exports.
5. We must analyze the _______ and double-check all the facts before we start writing about the crisis in Syria.
6. The doctoral _______ of some famous politicians have been in the focus of public attention recently.
7. Scientific explanations of these natural ______ are very interesting.
ü Sharing ideas:
1. Bring an issue of a newspaper and study it together in class. Discuss why some news stories are allotted the space on the front page of the paper. What makes these stories important? Would you allot them the same place if you were an editor of a big national newspaper? Would you give priority to the same stories if you edited a small local paper?
2. Role-play a meeting in the news-desk of a small local newspaper. Choose an editor responsible for the issue. Discuss the news stories, which are to be covered in the next issue of your paper. What space will be allotted for them in your paper? Why?
ü Comment on the following quotations. Choose one to make a written comment (200-250 words)
v “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising”.
Lord Northcliffe, British publisher 1865-1922
v “When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news”.
Charles Anderson Dana, American journalist, 1819-1897
v To a journalist, good news is often not news at all.
Phil Donahue, American entertainer, b. 1935
v Journalism consists largely in saying Lord Jones died to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
G.K. Chesterton, British writer, 1874-1936
PART 2. COLLECTING & DISSEMINATING
(picture)
· Before you read
· Discuss with your partner
ü How do you usually get your daily news? Do you read newspapers to get the news? Why? Why not? Describe the main advantages and disadvantages of your favourite news source.
ü Where does your favourite news source get the news from?
ü Are you sure that the news you read (watch) is trustworthy? Is it important for you to get reliable information? Why? Why not?
ü What global news agencies do you know? Are any og them working in your country?
· Study the information box below
| The Associated Press (“AP”) is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees news from the AP. Founded in 1846, the AP today is one of the largest and most trusted sources of independent newsgathering. The AP considers itself to be the backbone of the world’s information system, serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television, and online customers with coverage in text, photos, graphics, audio and video. http://www.ap.org/ |
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AP
Mark Twain once said: “There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe: the sun in heaven and the Associated Press down here”.
In Twain's time, the way to get news out was through the Associated Press, and it still is. In the twenty-first century, AP news stories reach more than one billion people every day, in print, broadcast, or online.
AP traces its lineage to 1846, when the telegraph first reached New York City. He service evolved after a series of meetings at which newspapers agreed to cooperate in the telegraph transmission of news.
Cooperation was a radical departure for the belligerent New York press. Newspapers competed aggressively, sometimes violently, to be the first with news. The telegraph revolutionized the race. Beginning in 1844, the old ways of competing to get the news – by boat, pony express, and carrier pigeons – combined with the new: getting copy to the nearest telegraph office.
After the outbreak of the Mexican war in 1846, the race for news focused on that front. Moses Yale Beach of the Sun, New York City's largest-selling newspaper, set up a pony express relay to race war news northward from New Orleans to Montgomery, where news copy was put on the great Southern Mail stagecoaches for delivery to the southernmost telegraph point. The Beach's express seems to have triggered the early AP. Although his method guaranteed the Sun a twenty-four-hour beat on war news, Beach decided to share it with his rivals, as an element of a more comprehensive cooperative scheme. He called the publishers of the other New York City papers to the office, and five publishers came.
They met at the Sun in mid 1846, as partners of necessity, not friends. Moses Beach proposed to his guests to share the benefits and costs of the telegraph transmission of the news. But his vision went beyond that, to the joint gathering of all telegraphic news from out of town. This was the beginning of the Associated Press.
In 1851, Daniel H. Craig, one of the AP founders, wrote: “All shall contribute to the expense and trouble of collecting and transmitting all important news the wish being to raise the standard of telegraphic reports to make them what they ought to be, reliable for accuracy, and the medium through which all really important and interesting news shall be placed before the public with the utmost dispatch”. Although the language has changed, this remains AP's blueprint.
The AP developed the style of news writing that shaped modern journalism.
Washington agent Lawrence Gobright's story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, for example, spent two hundred words on the president's theater party before getting to the fact that he had been shot. Not only was this style of reporting dull, but telegraph tolls made it expensive. In 1883, New England AP agents were instructed to put the vital news first and add the worthy detail later, if any.
Get the news, put the right lead on, and file it for the wire.
This 'lead first, details later' writing style is taught as the inverted pyramid, and emphasizes five Ws of news: who, what, when, where and why.
As the technology changed the delivery of news, the world of competing wire services has changed, too. In 1972, computers went into service for writing, editing, and transmitting AP's national news, supplanting typewriters and Teletypes.
There were also fewer newspapers to serve. The big city evening newspapers that once dominated had fallen, one by one, to new lifestyles and television competition. More and more Americans were either watching their news on TV or reading it on the Internet. There was no less competition to be first with the news, but the arena has dramatically changed.
Historically, AP has been a newspaper-driven service. In a new era, every second is a deadline for news that can be flashed instantly and globally to users who want it immediately.
But no twenty-first century technology can alter one basic AP tradition: its devotion to accurate, objective news coverage. AP's imprint of accuracy and fairness is as vital in the murky world of online fact or fiction as it was long ago, when rival press lords bent the truth. Created to take advantage of the newly invented telegraph, AP has confronted all succeeding revolutions in the news technology. Still a newspaper-owned cooperative, still dedicated to communicating facts, AP has become an international news network for the new age.
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(Walter R. Mears, ‘A brief history of Associated Press’)
· Having read the text
· Choose the best answer to the following questions:
- According to the text
a. The Associated Press Agency used to be very important
b. Mark Twain considered the Associated Press Agency to be very important
c. More than one billion people received information from the Associated Press Agency in the time of Mark Twain.
- The word lineage in the third passage means
a. direct descent from an ancestor
b. very long line
c. ages that have already passed
- The word departure in the fourth passage means
a. leaving to start a journey
b. a deviation from a traditional course of action or thought
c. the amount of a ship's change of longitude
- Moses Yale Beach called the publishers of the other New York City papers to the office because
a. He wanted to improve the system of news gathering and dissemination
b. He wanted to guarantee the Sun a twenty-four-hour beat on war news
c. He wanted to make friends with the publishers of the other New York City papers
- Washington agent Lawrence Gobright's story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination
a. Mainly described the president's theater party
b. Was extremely long
c. Was written in the old-fashioned manner
- According to the ‘inverted pyramid’ is
a. an architectural whim
b. a metaphor used by journalists and other writers to illustrate the placing of the most important information first within a text
c. a list of questions asked and answered in an article
- In the last passage of the text the author implies that
a. not all the news on the Internet are trustworthy
b. accuracy has become less important with the advent of the Internet
c. AP has lost much of its importance due to the internet
· Discuss the following questions
- What does the author tell us about the situation with news transmission in New York in 1846?
- What important event took place in 1844? Why was this event so important?
- What do we learn about the Mexican War from the text? Why did this event become an important landmark in the history of AP?
- What does the author call ‘AP's blueprint’? Why?
- What makes Lawrence Gobright's story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination unusual for the modern reader?
- What does the slogan 'lead first, details later' mean? Give your own examples to illustrate your explanation.
- What change occurred in AP around 1972? Do you think that this change was as important as that of the 1844? Why? Why not?
- What does the author mean when he writes that AP has been a newspaper-driven service?
- What basic AP tradition does the author mention in the text?
· Focus on vocabulary
Note:
“A good English-to-English dictionary is indispensable when learning new vocabulary. Understanding the basic meaning of unfamiliar new words is not enough – you have to be able to use them in appropriate contexts and collocations. Highlight useful new words so that they stand out whenever you flip through the book. This will help you to assimilate the words so that eventually you can incorporate them into your active vocabulary.
If a word or phrase seems specialized, obscure or recondite, you should not necessarily try to remember it – often you can guess its meaning from the context. Make your own choices about whether new words and phrases are useful or not”.
Leo Jones, “Progress to proficiency”
Work with your dictionary. Write out and learn the definitions of the following words (the first one is given as an example). Lines 11-18 are left for the words and phrases you consider to be worth highlighting and remembering.
| 1. lineage | direct descent from an ancestor; ancestry or pedigree Someone's lineage is the series of families from which they are directly descended. They can trace their lineage directly back to the 18th century. They are a respectable family of ancient lineage. In anthropology – a social group tracing its descent from a single ancestor |
| 2. departure | |
| 3. belligerent | |
| 4. rival | |
| 5. accuracy | |
| 6. dispatch | |
| 7. toll | |
| 8. lead | |
| 9. supplant | |
| 10. coverage | |
| 11. | |
| 12. | |
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| 14. | |
| 15. | |
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| 17. | |
| 18. |
· Focus on important terms
ü Study the content of the box
| To cover: · to deal with (a subject) by describing or analyzing its most important aspects or events (a sequence of novels that will cover the period from 1968 to the present) · investigate, report on, or show pictures of an event (Channel 4 are covering the match) Coverage: · the treatment of an issue by the media (the program won an award for its news coverage) Lead: · an opening paragraph of an article, news story. It precedes the main body of the article, and it gives the reader the main idea of the story. Deadline: · a time or date before which a particular task must be finished or a particular thing must be done. - to meet the deadline - to pass a deadline - to postpone the deadline for smth until noon - to set a deadline for smth |
ü Find and highlight the words from the box in the text. Study the way they are used in the story.
ü Rewrite the following sentences:
1. The main topic of her articles is the work of local schools. She ______ ________________________________________________________
2. Our work at this article is to be finished by the 25 of October. The 25 of October_ _________________________________________________________________
3. They decided that this work must be done by the 6 of November. They ________
_________________________________________________________________
4. They were late with this article. He _____________________________
5.
| A Human Interest Story is a type of news story that focuses on a person, group of people, and/or culture in an emotional manner. The goal is to create empathy between the audience and the subject matter, often with the intent to garner sympathy or awareness in the process. While the term is inherently neutral, it has still gained quite a negative stigma over the years. The label usually only comes up when denouncing a story as emotionally manipulative. Within the journalism community, human interest stories are viewed with disdain and people who specialize in them as not really being "true" journalists. Editors have a love-hate relation, since a human interest story helps bring more readers/viewers in through word of mouth but tends to not reflect well on their integrity. As such, human interest stories tend to be given much less priority in terms of placement within the newspaper/magazine/show. It's a slow news day when a human interest story makes the headline. However, the priority is also regionally affected, as these are more common and accepted in some parts of the world then in others. |
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