Journalism Workshop - 2nd March, 2015

A lively and informative workshop, led by experienced journalist Emma Boyde, offered a strong foundation for entries for our journalism competition. She explained the different structures required by a both news story and of a feature. A news story is often drawn as an inverted pyramid, which has the meat (who, what, when) in the opening paragraph with following paragraphs having progressively less crucial information, so that sub-editors under pressure can cut from the bottom without loss of meaning. In a feature, the introduction often takes an individual instance, then moves onto the core arguments, ending either with reference to ‘expert opinion’ on the subject or a return to the individual.

Emma then provided us with examples of a range of journalistic models: a piece of news analysis, a theatre review, a blog which went viral – and a piece by our judge for this competition, Kathryn Flett. She encouraged us to examine these in terms of structure and the use, or otherwise, of the first person. Feedback from this exercise involved some lively discussion of the merits and demerits of journalism and its function in the age of social media. Emma suggested that there remains a vital role for traditional journalism which uses proper fact checking as against the unknown reliability of social media. She talked about so-called ‘balance’ in a story as a misguided ideal because bias is inevitable, and a ‘balanced’ story would be, at best, 80:20. Our practical exercise was then to interview a partner, to write up the interview, incorporating a quotation, and for the interviewee to assess accuracy.