Journalism, Has It Changed That Much? Part 1.

Newspapers then and now, Part 1 what I learned in college and working at a newspaper. Part two, later, will deal with what I have seen lately.

I will not claim to have the most knowledge about the press and these blog posts I will try to limit my opinions to those things that I really do understand.

When I was in high school I decided that I would engage in several activities that were of more interest to me than the basic education. I really don’t think that it was a conscious decision but they were the things that I did that made being in high school more challenging. Some actually were part of the curriculum and did help toward graduation. The journalism and photography classes that I took gave me an understanding of what a news story should contain and how difficult it can be to take the pictures and write the story about an event that is occurring at a very difficult pace. Other classes gave me the education that I needed to be articulate in writing about a subject. I do agree that a basic education and taking classes in a variety of areas does help by giving the knowledge needed to write stories and actually convey the information that the reader needs.

What was the first thing that I remember from Journalism 1? Gather information accurately. Second write it clearly so that the reader will understand what is involved in the event. We started with the “Four W’s the H”. Who, Were, When and Why and How. We were encouraged to get all of this in the lead or first paragraph of the story. It was let the reader know the basics of the story and then flesh out the information starting with the most important and working down so that an editor could determine how much to use depending on importance and the space that was available in the publication. You will notice that even that long ago we were sure that some people had a short attention span and would not want to read a long story to find out what is occurring around them.

We learned to write our own headlines. We very quickly learned that the headline on a story was partially determined by the size of the type used and the column width available. They are always used to attract attention but should accurately convoy the content of the story and not be alarming. Remember that for those in a hurry the headlines may be the only part of the publication that is read. Sometimes more effort was made in writing the headline then the story because of the need to put so much information into so little space. You will note that some stories are given a one or two word headline maybe extending across the entire newspaper. That is followed with a sub headline that expands on the topic and leads directly into the story.

You will note that in high school I covered all areas of news including sports. By college I had several specialties including club news. The papers at both colleges covered on campus events and might look at the neighborhood of the school but not really cover city news. It was a big deal when the editor of the school paper attended a press conference for a U.S. presidential candidate. It was the candidate that he supported and he ignored all the rest of the candidates. His candidate did lose the national election but at least we had some coverage of a real news event. But all the things that we did were a part of learning. Even the time my story was not published because it might embarrass the school principal and the district, because he might have endangered the students in the school. He made a decision that a fire in an upstairs bathroom did not need to have the building evacuated. The event was covered on local TV news but not in the school newspaper.

So I’m not saying that we were perfect but that we did learn the best way to do the job and those basics are still as important now as they were then. I still do read newspapers and see some things on the internet. Unfortunately I see so many things that are not done very well at all levels and most of those may be caused by the speed of writing. That excuse is lost many times when it becomes obvious that the original story is not completely edited when it is updated for later publication.

I will spend more time on the current lack of desire to write a good story and more about the fact that they want to be the first to get the story out, in Part 2.