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News Writing
Anna McKane′s News Writing is a pioneering book dealing exclusively with the all-important craft of writing news stories. The book deals fully with all aspects of writing news, including how to write a good intro, or first paragraph; how to order the information and assemble a winning story; and what language to use. It provides a step-by-step guide to constructing a story, with good and bad examples, and a detailed analysis of style, language, and grammar. There are checklists to help inexperienced writers to measure their work.
- GenresJournalism
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 20, 2017
I enjoyed this read, which is not too heavy and deals straighforwardly with many aspects of news writing. Four and a half stars from me. I like that the book relates to Britain, and we are given one creative example of a breaking news story involving London Zoo, an escaped tiger and a jogging starlet.
I was surprised not to find the pyramid structure mentioned, just the reverse pyramid; that one is demonstrated to us many times. The pyramid style is also worth a mention and is used in softer stories, colour pieces, columns and such, where description of the situation comes first and then the major storyline or the hook follows. The author uses many instances of 'It is' or 'There are'. Bad example.
The main reason I would give four and a half rather than five stars is the wealth of typing which seems to be typing for the sake of typing. Don't mix up homonyms. There and their and they're. Councillor and counsellor. Fine. Do we need three and a half pages of examples? I don't, and if your reading and writing is so poor that you do, I'm wondering why you want to be a journalist. The news stories we read with mixups are often computer transcripts of speech. Many stories now are produced by computer including sports items and basic news reporting, with little human input bar grabbing a few quotes. Similarly we are given a few pages of shrinking phrases to contain basic words of one or two syllables, which might be needed for certain papers and stories but definitely not for all. And 22 pages are given to retyping what was in every major national newspaper over a few chosen dates. This all just comes across as padding.
Luckily the book does contain plenty of useful material, including the author sending out students to prowl around Covent Garden and pick up stories daily. Checklists, getting key facts into the story and a flow chart of how a news story is treated when it hits the office are the most interesting parts. As this was published in 2006 the ubiquitous phone and news feed has become more a fact of life so an update wouldn't go amiss.
I borrowed this book from the Dublin Business School library. This is an unbiased review.
I was surprised not to find the pyramid structure mentioned, just the reverse pyramid; that one is demonstrated to us many times. The pyramid style is also worth a mention and is used in softer stories, colour pieces, columns and such, where description of the situation comes first and then the major storyline or the hook follows. The author uses many instances of 'It is' or 'There are'. Bad example.
The main reason I would give four and a half rather than five stars is the wealth of typing which seems to be typing for the sake of typing. Don't mix up homonyms. There and their and they're. Councillor and counsellor. Fine. Do we need three and a half pages of examples? I don't, and if your reading and writing is so poor that you do, I'm wondering why you want to be a journalist. The news stories we read with mixups are often computer transcripts of speech. Many stories now are produced by computer including sports items and basic news reporting, with little human input bar grabbing a few quotes. Similarly we are given a few pages of shrinking phrases to contain basic words of one or two syllables, which might be needed for certain papers and stories but definitely not for all. And 22 pages are given to retyping what was in every major national newspaper over a few chosen dates. This all just comes across as padding.
Luckily the book does contain plenty of useful material, including the author sending out students to prowl around Covent Garden and pick up stories daily. Checklists, getting key facts into the story and a flow chart of how a news story is treated when it hits the office are the most interesting parts. As this was published in 2006 the ubiquitous phone and news feed has become more a fact of life so an update wouldn't go amiss.
I borrowed this book from the Dublin Business School library. This is an unbiased review.
March 1, 2020
A very good book on writing news stories: enlightening and concise, and funny sometimes. One of the best I’ve read in English so far. If you are a journalist or an editor, or want to understand how journalists work (maybe you are a PR person), give it a try.
July 2, 2020
Just Read The Book To Read It
I can't really give an opinion about the book. I just read it to learn something about being a reporter. The book was well written, and very informative.
I can't really give an opinion about the book. I just read it to learn something about being a reporter. The book was well written, and very informative.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews