Practical Newspaper Reporting

David Spark, Geoffrey Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780240515113
• eBook ISBN: 9781136025372
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This guide to all aspects of the reporter's job, has been extensively revised and updated for a third edition. It considers:
What is news?
How the modern newsroom operates
How facts are gathered and checked
The reporter and picture ideas
District reporting
Techniques of interviewing
News writing and newspaper language
How to summarize
Reporting the courts
Political and industrial reporting
Aspects of sportswriting
Feature writing and arts reviewing


The book also includes an important new chapter on the place of local government in newspaper coverage and it examines a newspaper's internal structure and the reporter's daily work in the light of the latest technology.

This classic textbook is a must for all journalism and media courses and offers the ideal career introduction for the young journalist.

1 WHAT IS NEWS?

Suppose you had the task of planning a newspaper and you had before you ten reports which began in the following ways:

1  The Prime Minister has announced the appointment of a new body to regulate company takeovers.

2  Fifteen people have been killed in a battle in Congo.

3  Bournemouth used 500 million cubic feet of gas last year.

4  Maureen Johnson, aged 17, was sitting in her bath when she heard a hammering on the door. ‘What’s up?’ she shouted. ‘The house is on fire,’ came the reply.

5  The chief executive’s exit has hit Toad shares.

6  The Mayor said yesterday that the Government’s new housing policy might or might not be good for the town.

7  The chairman of the Finance Committee and a 21-year-old shopgirl have disappeared from their homes. Both have left letters to say they have gone together to Biarritz.

8  A 50-year-old home carer will meet the Duke of Edinburgh during his visit to Blanktown next week.

9  Three memorable goals enabled Blanktown United to reach the semifinal of the FA Cup last night.

10  Five hundred of the world’s highest-paid scientists have gathered in Oxford to discuss elementary particles.

How would you assess the news value of these reports? Which would you use and which would you reject?

This is really, of course, an editor’s or chief sub-editor’s task, but a reporter should also be able to recognize what is news for the newspaper; to spot which aspects of an assignment are the ones to be given prominence in writing the story; to understand why a particular job is being covered.

What is it that makes an event or a set of facts news – and what is it about one news idea that gives it a better rating than another? How do you assess news value?

Let us look again at the stories given above. You will notice, when you start to sort them, that a lot depends on the type and readership of the paper you work for. If yours is a country weekly you would reject the Congo story and stress the local football club’s success, the chairman’s elopement and the home carer story. Unless your weekly was very staid you would find a prominent position, too, for Maureen Johnson’s interrupted bath. A proportion of the non-football readers would identify with the Cup success, and many would go for the human interest in the elopement, the home carer and the bathtime story.

If you worked on a regional or national quality morning paper your choice would be different. You would give prominence to the Government’s plan to regulate takeover bids. It is an important move. You would get in a paragraph or two about the battle in Congo, or several paragraphs if you were writing for a well-informed readership. If the battle were part of a well-reported crisis you might give it a much bigger show.

A national tabloid might run the elopement story, particularly if it could get a picture of the girl. It might, on a slack day, use a few paragraphs on an inside page of Maureen Johnson’s bath, but the home carer’s story would not rate sufficient interest outside the local area.

A provincial morning or evening paper would use these three reports prominently if they were within its circulation area. If they were not, the elopement story and maybe the bath story could be given space on a page of national news.

The Oxford elementary particles debate would probably be given coverage in the more upmarket national papers and those circulating in Oxford – and perhaps Cambridge. The Bournemouth gas report would rate a few paragraphs only in the Bournemouth paper.

The views of the Mayor would not arouse much enthusiasm among readers unless the story turned out to be more interesting than its opening. The Toad shares story was featured on several City pages. It could intrigue national papers. What on earth are Toad shares?

Assessing news value

What can we learn from this exercise? Two important things:

1  It is fairly easy to define what news is.

2  It is less easy to assess its value. Why? Because we are talking about two different things.

All ten of the stories we have looked at passed muster as news because it was the first time the information they contained was being put before the reader; they were saying something new. If what any of them was saying was not new then the story would not have been a news story, for newness is an essential quality of news.

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary has a useful definition for news: ‘Tidings; new information of recent events; new occurrences as a subject of report or talk.’

The term ‘information’ is important because it is the information or knowledge of an event rather than the event itself that news is concerned with. The event might already be known to the reader but not the new information that is being presented. A single event can go on generating news in this way for days and even weeks. A secret marriage can become news years afterwards because information about it has come to light.

Many writers in trying to define what news is have got bogged down in the qualities that news stories contain. ‘News is people,’ says Harold Evans, former editor of The Times. Well, it frequently does involve people; but it can also concern legislation or an archaeological discovery, or all sorts of things.

News should be surprising; it should be dramatic; it should, said an American editor, make people say ‘Gee whizz!’ All useful qualities if we can find them – and editors are crying out for such qualities in their papers’ stories – but a story can still be news even if it lacks them.

The crux of the matter is that to merit its place in a newspaper news should not only be news in an absolute sense of being new; it should also be the sort of news that the readers of the paper are likely to want to read – and there is an almost infinite variety of newspapers and readerships. A story’s news value is the value it has to the newspaper printing it. This is why such variable answers were possible to the questions we asked about the ten examples at the beginning of this chapter.

Good news and bad

Some critics complain that newspapers prefer printing bad news to good because it sells more copies. It begs the question: what is bad news? In some developing countries, governments who want the news all to be good say that newspapers should be guided in what they print by the interests of national development. The more confident – and more courageous – journalists refuse to be bound by their government’s view of the national interest. The result is that in such countries police raids and sedition charges are rife.

In Britain just about any news, good or bad by whatever yardstick one wants to apply, can get into newspapers if the context is right. One good news story regularly covered is the economic success of the Far East and of Far Eastern companies investing in Britain. Because of this a bad-news story – an anti-government strike in Korea – got a lot of coverage. It showed Korea’s success to be shakier than we thought.

This backs up the finding of former BBC man John Venables (What is News?, Elm Publications 1993) on good and bad news that bad news is published because it is disturbing. People read newspapers to find out what may be threatening them in the big world outside. It helps to forearm them. Another ex-BBC man, John Wilson, wrote in Understanding Journalism (Routledge) that bad news was simply more memorable than good. We all remember our hairier and most embarrassing moments.

In a democracy the readers are the ultimate arbiters of the sort of news they want to read. If a newspaper’s news content is not right for them they don’t buy it. There is plenty of choice. Newspapers are the forum in which all manner of news, opinions and people compete for hearing.

Readership

In Britain there are many sorts of newspapers: tabloid dailies for readers who want to be entertained as well as informed; quality dailies with a mostly better-educated, often professional readership; specialist papers such as the Financial Times and the Angling Times; town evening papers serving big conurbations; country weeklies spreading across counties. Some papers specialize in foreign and world news. There is The Guardian with its big following among teachers and academics; the Daily Mail with its strong women’s readership; papers with pronounced political leanings – some dedicated to particular parties, or even religions, and a variety of civic newspapers and free newspapers serving the interests of advertisers.

Among this wide choice it is possible to suggest a few general principles. The most important – as has been explained – is that news values for any newspaper depend upon the readers, and upon the editor’s concept of what the readers will want to read and can be persuaded to read.

With general newspapers, and certainly most provincial dailies, evenings and weeklies on which journalists are likely to start their careers, it is worth assuming that a large segment of the readers, male and female, will not have had higher education. Another useful assumption is that the primary interest of readers in buying the local paper will probably be in people and the doings of people. Television interviews encourage viewers in this tendency to see every issue in personal terms. Although committees and plans and statistics are the fodder of local news and are vital channels of information, it is often the personal story which catches the reader’s eye – the story of Maureen Johnson’s bath or the eloping chairman.

Readers are interested in how the news affects them and their children, but they are also interested in how it affects other people. Many readily identify with people in trouble; they are intrigued by those involved in controversy, with people at the centre of great events. For instance, they might not normally want to read anything about Congo, but if a great crisis came upon the people there and was graphically described then their interest could be aroused.

News ideas

Here are some more general principles:

•  In pursuing news ideas a good test is: could it appear just as well in tomorrow’s papers as today’s? If it can wait till tomorrow then it should give place to an idea which must be done today. Good ideas that are not pursued at once can be overtaken by events – or by a rival paper. But beware here: you may feel that an idea that seems fruitless will have to yield to one in which the facts are more certain; yet occasionally you might get an exclusive story by pursuing facts that are hard to obtain.

•  Whatever the story you pursue and present to your paper, not only must it be new; it must have the best and most complete facts you can obtain and you must be able to vouch for their accuracy.

•  Unexpectedness is a useful news quality. Big fires and robberies are unexpected and they concern people – two top qualities.

•  Do not give an exaggerated importance to ‘latest news’. Your newspaper will be happy to get in aspects of a story which are too late for its rivals. But this journalistic one-upmanship can be lost on the reader who might find what was said or done earlier more interesting or important. A story can still be worth using even if it has appeared in another paper. If the story is of interest to your paper, your readers may want to see your version – as long as it is your version in your words.

•  The newness of news is enhanced if it is also the disclosure of a secret. ‘A newspaper lives by disclosure,’ wrote a famous editor of The Times, John Thaddeus Delane, after a great row with the government of the day. William Randolph Hearst spoke similarly: ‘News is something which someone wants suppressed. All the rest is advertising.’

•  As for importance; while this should be relative to a newspaper’s readership there are events, such as the announcement of a general election or the outbreak of war, which take precedence because they are important moments in history. Part of a journalist’s task is to arouse readers’ interest in things which he or she judges to be important. The position and space that stories occupy in a newspaper are reflections of a quality judgement of their importance within the pages.

In examining the techniques of newspaper reporting the model taken for the purposes of this book will be that of an average British provincial newspaper – a town evening or weekly serving a community with a wide cross-section of area and edition news plus supporting features and sport. There will be many references, however, to journalism in the wider field.

The chapters that follow will look closely at the routine of news gathering, at the variety of assignments likely to be covered by a young reporter, the use of contacts and inquiries, the handling of human interest stories, techniques of interviewing and fact checking and legal restraints on reporting.

They will also give guidance on news writing, and will examine specialisms such as the coverage of courts and councils, industrial and sports reporting and the arts.

2 GATHERING THE NEWS

Every day reporters go looking for news. Newspaper columns have a relentless appetite for it; no sooner are they filled than the process starts all over again. Round the clock. Day after day. Week after week.

News can be found anywhere in a newspaper’s circulation area – and occasionally outside of it – anywhere where anything worthy of remark is happening. But it has to be organized, pursued, checked and written up in a way that makes it readable and attractive to the readers. It requires particular skills.

The news room

The heart of the news-gathering operation is the news room. Here the news editor (or chief reporter) presides over the news desk, compiling the diary of jobs, briefing reporters, monitoring the day’s (or week’s) coverage, checking the finished stories, liaising with the photographers, answering queries, signing expenses and briefing the editor and chief sub-editor on the progress of the operation.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1  What is news?
• 2  Gathering the news
• 3  Picture ideas
• 4  District reporting
• 5  Interviewing
• 6  News writing
• 7  Newspaper language
• 8  Reporting the courts
• 9  Reporting local government
• 10  Politics
• 11  Business and industry
• 12  Reporting religions
• 13  Some thoughts on sportswriting
• 14  Summarizing
• 15  Feature writing
• 16  Arts reviewing
• 17  Newspaper structure
• 18  Looking things up
• 19  A note on ethics
• 20  Careers in journalism
• Appendix 1 Investigative reporting
• Appendix 2 Code of Practice for the Press
• Index