Among my journalism handouts: how to write a hard news story, the news story vs the English essay, and how a journalist stays out of the story.
Journalists prefer the neutral “said” to attribute a source’s statements, opinions, and emotions. Using “claimed” generates doubt. Using “explained” confers trust. Flowery alternatives compete with the unbiased reporting of facts.
Sometimes when I find myself putting more than a usual amount of creativity into a comment on a student paper, I take a break from churning through papers to make another meme.
“In the past, people fabricated content. There were ‘midnight flyers,’ which were pieces of propaganda usually sent out by candidates and put on the windshield of your car or under your door at home. And there were forms of content that contained serious misinformation in them. Sometimes they looked news-like and sometimes they didn’t,” explains Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “But there wasn’t a…
A journalist’s response to President Trump’s early morning caps-imbued assault on the FAKE news media. Let’s be clear about what Trump is suggesting here. He wants the Senate intelligence committee to open an investigation into the “Fake News Networks” to get to the bottom of why so much of the news is “just made up.” He offers no evidence of this claim. And yet, the President of the United States…
Great behind-the-scenes story of the hard work that went into breaking the Tom Price private travel story. The first tip came from a casual conversation with a source back in May: Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was using private jets for routine travel, possibly in violation of federal travel rules that allowed such flights only when commercial options weren’t available. | But it was a tip and little else…