Feature Writing and Reporting. Jennifer Brannock Cox
Watch for strange addresses, such as .com.co or .lo.
Too good to be true? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Look to see if other news outlets are reporting anything similar.
Keep reading: Read beyond the headline or the tweet. Reading the whole article will help you distinguish fact from fiction.
Use new tools: Emerging tools make detecting fake and unbalanced news easier. Try browser extensions, such as Google Chrome’s Media Bias/Fact Check tool and B.S. Detector.
Reverse it: Do a reverse Google search of images by uploading a picture to https://images.google.com. Click on the camera icon and upload the image to see where it came from.
Shifting Gears: Why We Need to Tell Stories in New Ways
Newsrooms have traditionally fallen behind in terms of innovating. Journalists were slow to publish their articles online, and when they did, they simply sent in the print version of the story with no consideration for the different needs of online audiences. This process of taking content created for a nondigital medium and “shoveling” (copying and pasting) it online without making changes produced what is called shovelware. News organizations also worried about publishing content on social media sites in their early days, concerned about giving content away for free.
We now know that at least two-thirds of Americans of all ages get their news on social media, and that number is likely to increase. Looking at younger Americans, ages 18 to 49, we find that 78% get their news from social media.7 Journalists are changing their old ways of thinking and trying new strategies to thrive in the Digital Age.
Broken “Breaking News”
News organizations compete fiercely to be the first to “break” a story. When a significant news event occurs, reporters race to the scene, making calls and reporting details, all while trying not to alert their competitors to the story. But reporters are no longer the ones who break the news, usually—it is often a citizen on the scene with a mobile phone and a social media account who posts it first. When bombers set off explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, Twitter was flooded with immediate eyewitness accounts, while major news networks followed with the news about 20 minutes later.8
Twitter/@caitlingiddings
When news organizations focus only on the timely news of the day, they can wind up parroting each other, telling the same story in a similar way across multiple publications. This is especially common when publications or television stations are all owned by one corporation whose managers write scripts or articles to be shared in multiple markets. Before the internet, this convergence of resources could go unnoticed. How would someone in Seattle know that the story they just read or watched had also been broadcast in St. Louis, Baltimore and Las Vegas?
Twitter/@shananaomi
In the Digital Age, viewers are quicker to notice parroting. The Sinclair Broadcast Group got into trouble with audiences in 2018 when corporation heads forced anchors at nearly 200 television news stations across the country to read identical scripts echoing President Donald Trump’s accusations of other media outlets for producing so-called “fake news.” Viewers attacked Sinclair, producing both parody videos of the anchors for entertainment and compilations of the anchors reading the script as a warning to social media viewers against stations owned by the company. Media experts deemed the script “right-wing propaganda” and called reporters who were forced to read it “soldiers in Trump’s war on the media.”9
This is a series of news shots of dozens of television news anchors working for the Sinclair media corporation, who were all required to deliver identical messages from a prepared script calling other media outlets “fake news” in March 2018.10
Anchors at Sinclair TV stations across the country read the same scripted speech to their audiences, as shown in this compiled picture from the Poynter Institute.
Beyond Breaking: Adding Value
When it comes to breaking news, the internet has already won. Journalists need to go beyond the basic details—who, what, when and where—to focus on the impact of the event and its effect on the community. That is where feature writing and reporting skills are required to engage audiences and convey impact. Reporters can add depth using feature techniques, including:
Focusing less on what and more on why and how.
Seeking to add context to the news event: Has something like this happened before? How did this issue begin?
Not relying solely on official sources but finding out who is impacted and telling their stories.
Asking probing questions and checking the facts: Does everyone agree with the account of what happened and how?
Thinking about long-term effects: How will this impact people in the future?
We will explore in-depth methods for writing and reporting these types of news features in the chapters to come.
Tearing Down the Gate
Media scholars have traditionally identified journalists as gatekeepers who make decisions about what information reaches the public and how it is presented and distributed. As gatekeepers, journalists generally decide what events are newsworthy based on one of three factors:
1 Timeliness of the news event. Is something of impact happening now in the news organization’s coverage area?
2 Goals of policymakers. What topics are important to official sources who pass along information to journalists?
3 Opinions of news producers. What topics are resonating with reporters, editors and managers at the news organization?
Journalists exercise control over the news their audiences get and have often believed they know what is best when it comes to what readers should know. When reading a newspaper or magazine, it is relatively easy to control the flow of information, as audiences have to content themselves with only the news that is right in front of them. Journalists indicate what they believe is most important, putting it on the front pages of each newspaper section or magazine and ordering the sections according to what they believe to be most newsworthy, and print readers tend to follow along, reading linearly, from top to bottom, left to right and front to back.
Consuming news online is a more nonlinear process. Readers not only have the ability to click around randomly within a news website; they can go to any one of thousands of sources of information to seek the news they want. If readers want news about the latest celebrity coupling, they don’t have to sift through the front pages of a newspaper or more in-depth stories in a magazine—they can simply visit niche websites geared toward celebrity gossip or use a search engine to find news about a particular couple.
News organizations have to fight harder for readers’ attention online, causing them to rethink how news is defined. Now journalists must pay closer attention to a fourth factor in determining what to write about:
4.Public opinion. What topics are trending with audiences right now?
Taking trending topics into account when writing