Writing for Journalists

Matt Swaine, Harriett Gilbert, Gavin Allen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000405484
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Thoroughly revised and updated, the fourth edition of Writing for Journalists focuses on the craft of journalistic writing, offering invaluable insight on how to hook readers and keep them to the end of your article.

The book offers a systematic approach to news and feature writing that starts with the basics and builds to more complex and longer pieces. The authors give the reader the tools they need to deliver engaging and authoritative writing that works across print and digital. Drawing on professional insight from writers across the industry, the book guides readers through the essential elements needed to write powerful and effective news stories, from hard news pieces to features on business, science, travel and entertainment reviews. New to this edition are hands-on writing exercises accompanying each chapter to help reinforce key points; chapters on how to build a professional profile, pitch stories and get commissioned; and a section on online writing, SEO, analytics and writing for social media.

This is an essential guide for all journalism students and early-career journalists. It also has much to offer established journalists looking to develop their writing and lead editorial teams.

1
How to read like a journalist

Introduction

The job of a journalist can be broken into two key functions: finding things out and then telling people what it is that they have discovered. That does not do justice to one of the most rewarding and diverse careers you can have, but it is a useful starting point to explain the scope of this book. Within the following chapters we are going to focus on the second of these roles: communicating stories, through the written word.

We won’t spend a great deal of time on how to find news, interview sources or dig for information. We will focus on the craft of writing: understanding how to structure a story that other people are going to read.

We live in an era of free content, so why wouldn’t people want stories they can often access for free through their mobile devices? Rather than handing money to your local newsagent, payment comes in the form of your attention: time that could be spent on a multitude of distractions from social media and mobiles games, to podcasts, video, other stories and even the odd conversation with real people.

This great proliferation of content means that every story has to be clearer on its purpose and work harder to get and retain people’s attention.

If you want to understand the challenge you are up against, spend a morning watching commuters on their train journey to work, scrolling and swiping through stories on their phones. Get a sense of how little time they spend on one article before they swipe to the next. What was it that put them off? A poorly constructed intro? A line that didn’t make sense? A joke that didn’t hit the mark? An impenetrable wall of data? Or an article that didn’t deliver on its promise?

Perhaps this morning’s commuters aren’t even reading stories, but scrolling idly through news feeds or Facebook and Twitter posts. What does a headline have to do to grab their attention and get them to click and read a piece of journalism?

The web and mobile devices we increasingly use to access journalism have radically changed the way we find, read and engage with stories. In Chapter 5 we explain how to get your articles as high as possible on a Google search, how to write for social media and make your articles work across print, desktops and mobile devices.

But the essentials of good writing haven’t changed that much and the fundamentals are arguably more important than ever. So we start with a traditional approach to constructing news. It aims to be “platform agnostic,” because good writing shines through whether it’s being read on a small screen, on a laptop or in print.

The chapters that follow will focus on the craft of writing news and features that make the issues you want to cover interesting and accessible to the widest possible audience. It will tell you how to write reviews, develop your own editorial voice, build your personal brand, write travel, interview, science and business articles.

This book aims to equip you with the skills and confidence to succeed in the world of journalism, whether you are starting a course, trying to get your first job, leading a team of writers or looking for your next professional challenge.

You know how to tell stories

If you’re new to writing, here’s the good news: you are already hardwired to tell stories and it’s something you probably do on a daily basis. What’s more, your potential readers are instinctively interested in hearing about other people and the challenges they face. We have evolved a desire and ability to share information that has given our species a unique evolutionary advantage.

Just imagine the scene on a frosty moorland as the last Ice Age was drawing to a close. Two cave-persons stumble upon each other as their day of hunting and/or gathering draws to a close.

“Hey Ugg, you hear about Dave? He attacked by bear, in cave! He don’t come out.”

“Thank you, Thagg. I’ll certainly avoid that cave in future.”

Thankfully, Ugg is now less at risk of bear attack and is more likely to pass on her genes to future generations. And although Thagg, her friend and proto-journalist, is clearly struggling with the rudiments of grammar, he has delivered information that is both timely and of value to his audience, which in this case is Ugg, and any other Troglodytes who get to hear the tale of Dave, who died in a cave.

Some 12,000 years later and we are still telling stories: “You’ll never guess what happened to me last night”; “Did you hear about the new shop opening on the high street?”; “I bumped into Mandy Jenkins from school this morning. You won’t believe who she married…”

Jonathan Gottschall, the author of The Storytelling Animal, says that we are a species addicted to storytelling. No one knows whether story is an evolutionary adaptation or a side effect, he says, but his book explores the benefits that we as a species derive from telling stories. An appreciation of why we tell stories and what makes them so compelling is vital for any journalist.

Most of the stories we share are told directly to small groups, often just one other person. That means that, whether you are conscious of it or not, you are able to continually monitor their reaction and adapt your story accordingly. If someone scrunches their forehead, it’s likely they haven’t understood what you are saying. That would be your cue to offer more information or explain something more clearly. If they start yawning, then you need to throw in more excitement or get to the point. Most of us respond to a host of prompts like this every day, without ever registering how we are being influenced by our audience.

When you write as a journalist you are attempting to communicate with a far larger group of people, the vast majority of whom you will never meet. You have little idea about their knowledge of the subject. You don’t see any of the visual cues you might get when you’re telling a story in person. You won’t be there as they read to gauge their interest or offer extra explanation.

So the art of good writing starts by really thinking about who your reader is and what they need to know. You cannot make assumptions about their knowledge, so you will need to explain key details clearly. You certainly won’t be able to make your story more interesting if it looks like they are about to click to another article. So you need a plan to engage your reader from the top of your piece.

Learning to write well involves a significant shift in thinking and that requires hard work and a great deal of practice. For that reason, each chapter in this book features exercises to develop the basics, but that is not going to be enough to turn you into a professional writer.

Writing for a student paper, setting up your own blog, getting work experience at your local paper, or taking a practical course in journalism are all ways to develop your skills. Writing regularly means you are thinking about how you construct sentences, build stories, explain complex ideas and engage your readers.

These days analytics offer incredible insights into how readers engage with content online. Google Analytics is an easily available tool that can tell you which stories on a website are the most popular and how long people spend on them. Organisations like Chartbeat or sites like Dataminr can give even more detailed data that help publications sharpen their editorial strategy (see Chapter 5).

You probably won’t have access to that level of information at the moment, and there aren’t that many opportunities to sit with readers and question them on the way they read a piece of journalism. But there is one person who you can observe at length, and that is yourself. To do that effectively, you need to identify what sparks your interest, what keeps you reading or makes you turn to another article.

Reading to develop good writing

There are many reasons to read widely and one of the most important is to develop a sense of what constitutes good writing. Every time you read a piece of journalism, you should consider how the writer is trying to engage you as a reader. Here are three questions you should start asking from today…

1. Why am I reading this story? Get in the habit of identifying the reader value in every story. What was it that made you want to read this piece? What was it in the headline or sell line that encouraged you to open the paper or click from an online link? Thinking about your own motivation will help you to understand why other people might engage with your work.
2. What tone is the writer trying to strike with their readers? The readership of each publication is different. People who buy The Economist clearly do so for different reasons than subscribers to Your Horse magazine. So ask how the writer aims to engage the audience of this publication. Where did they start the story and why? What kind of language do they use? What relationship are they trying to forge with the reader?
3. When did you stop reading? As we will learn in Chapter 2, news is constructed to deliver the most important information at the top, so it is possible to stop reading at any point in the article. So where did you stop in a particular news story and why? Did you read to the end of a feature and if not, why not? What might have kept you reading longer? You want to keep your readers till the final paragraph, so start to develop an understanding of exactly what that involves.

Good writing starts by thinking about your readers. Examining your own motivation and your own response to stories is a good place to start.

Read to develop a love of words

As a writer, words are your raw material. You need to use them with precision. Confidence with words means you should know the difference between affect and effect. You should know that a cache is a hidden horde, for example of treasure or weapons, while cachet is something worthy of respect or admiration. You should know that a city that is genuinely “decimated” has lost 10% of its buildings but also that its meaning has evolved and that some publications may use it to suggest more significant destruction.

You will need to be able to use words to communicate complex ideas; to describe how events unfolded; to bring characters in your stories to life and to give readers a ring-side view of the action. Words matter and the way you use them will determine how effective you are as a writer. Reading is the quickest way to sharpen your understanding of language and your ability to select exactly the right word for the job.

Reading is also a good way to identify the kind of writer you want to be. You might do that by following particular journalists who impress you with their tone, content and style. By analysing what it is they do well, you will find it easier to develop your own voice. Who do you admire as a writer? It’s a question that I’d always ask an applicant for a staff writing position. You may well be asked the same thing in the future, so I suggest you have an answer ready to go.

Read to understand the world

Being a journalist gives you licence to call anyone up and ask them questions, to go where the action is taking place and to find things out first-hand. Editors want to employ writers who are inquisitive, well informed and will dig for answers, and journalism is an incredible job for anyone who wants to find out about the world. Reading is the quickest way to satisfy (or develop) that curiosity.

As an aspiring journalist, you should have a good handle on world events, a sense of how international institutions work, how local government operates and the ways that people find to fill the gaps in democracy. You should have some sense of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) could impact on jobs in the next decade; what austerity is doing to social care; the debate around gender pricing and the campaign to reintroduce lynx into the UK. Consuming journalism, whether in written or broadcast format, is an efficient way to build that knowledge.

Don’t think everything needs to be in The Economist, the Financial Times or Newsweek. You should be equally aware of modern culture, sport, music and comedy. It doesn’t hurt to have an opinion on what made the Marvel superhero series so popular, what the Kardashians have been up to and the tribulations of boxing champions and football teams.

Good journalists understand the importance of impartiality. We can never fully escape our own biases, and our view of what constitutes “unbiased reporting” is unlikely to correspond to anyone else’s. But there is a great deal to be said for reading widely to challenge your own preconceived ideas.

So if you tend towards left-wing papers, you should aim to read articles each week from publications on the right of the political spectrum. If you only read publications from Western media outlets, then look for stories from English-language papers from China, Africa or South America. Global perspectives on current...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 How to read like a journalist
• 2 The news intro
• 3 The first three paragraphs
• 4 News structure and style
• 5 Writing for the web
• 6 Developing feature ideas
• 7 Starting your feature
• 8 Structure and quotes
• 9 Storytelling and travel writing
• 10 Interview features
• 11 Writing reviews
• 12 Making complex ideas accessible
• 13 Boxouts, design and multimedia
• 14 The professional writer
• Glossary of terms used in journalism
• Recommended reading
• Suggested answers
• Index