Writing a news story calls on different skills than writing a traditional essay.

Updated an older instructional handout with a bunch of new examples and some fancy red/green color coding. To write a news story, you’ll use many of the skills that help you write good personal essays; however, the two kinds of writing have important differences, so what counts as “good writing” is also different. English Essay: Driven by your thoughtful analysis of long quotations from already-published sources (written by experts). It’s a…

Journalists Prefer Said

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.

About to DM a journalism class role-playing exercise. Surprises coming!

Journalists write to inform, not to impress.

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.

Fake News Remains Top Industry Concern in 2017

“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…

Donald Trump’s chilling escalation of his war with the media

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…