We all know that local news differs from international news in their coverage of events close to home, but different networks and mediums cover the same story differently, even given the same facts and figures. Today, on the fourth day of Israel’s offensive, I thought I’d look at a few major news outlets.
Hit the jump for notes on how the story was treated by the BBC, Fox, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, and Reuters.
The excellent community/blog Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists has announced their December topic as “building your online brand”, and their contributors are coming up with some useful tips for those who are only starting to explore online publicity as a real option. You can find all posts in the category here, and two useful posts suggesting beginner’s starting points can be found here and here.
It’s interesting to compare what other young journalists and students are doing to get noticed, so I’d reccomend droppng by TNTJ and taking a look. There’s some useful stuff on their parent site, journalism.co.uk too.
When editing other young journalists’ work, I’m often amazed at the lack of basic knowledge shown by English majors when it comes to news writing. Often, they miss a big part of the story. They shouldn’t, because there’s only six things we need to know:
What, why, when, how, where and who.
These are the things that make up a story. It’s always been so, even back in the days when Rudyard Kipling was a journalist, and wrote the poem:
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who…