What is news?

“News is something someone somewhere wants to suppress…everything else is advertising.” Lord Northcliff

To be a successful journalist you must develop a “nose for the news”. In order to do this, the distinction between hard news and soft news and the distinctive styles of both must be clear. These ideas were fleshed out in class today.

A journalist’s role has been described as “comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable,” and covering hard news items aims to achieve this. Hard news covers politics, war, crime, health, public rounds. Soft news includes book launches, school fetes, cat stuck in tree, and they are usually found at the bottom of a news bulletin. However it’s important to remember that hard news topics can also have a soft edge. For example, a story on health from a hard news perspective would be a story on finding the cure for cancer, but a soft approach would focus on a person’s battle with cancer.

I find it very difficult to write about hard news items, without giving them a softer side, so it came as no surprise when my first piece came back red. I enjoy seasoning the story with a bit of flavour and colour through a descriptive lead or catchy word choices so it’s very challenging, because my impression of hard news means draining the ‘spunk’ out of the story.

Here’s what I learnt from ‘Diva Dead’ – covering the imaginary death of Makybe Diva and owner Tony Santic.

• When writing a hard news story, use the word “crash” over “accident”. Let’s not sugar coat anything now.

• The word ‘approximately’ is over-used. Try ‘near’, ‘around’, ‘about’.

• ‘Raining overnight’ sounds harder than a soft ‘miserable’.

• If the same word is in a sentence twice it is too much

• Almost every time, the word ‘that’ can be taken out

• One sentence represents one thought. Find the most efficient way to say it.