Many news stories are about action. You want to capture that in your writing and seize the attention of your audience. One of the ways is by choosing the active voice.

Strong verbs are the best words for suggesting action: run, leap, hit, accuse, rescue, build, explore, kick, ride, catch, etc. And verbs have two “voices”: the active and the passive.

In the active voice: I wrote this module.

In the passive voice: This module was written by me.

In the active voice, somebody is doing something. In the passive voice, something is being done.

They are both perfectly correct, grammatically, but the active voice is shorter, stronger and more direct. It works much better in news stories. There are exceptions, which we will come to later, but in the vast majority of cases, the active voice gives your story impact and vitality.

Here are two ways of writing the same story:

Passive voice: After several months of better trading conditions, the annual bonus to staff at the Fred Smith store group will be paid for the first time in four years.

Active voice: Staff at Fred Smith stores will get their first annual bonus in four years, after the group reported better trading conditions.

The active voice works better – it is less wordy and it puts the human interest angle first.

So the active voice is a basic part of a journalist’s toolkit. It is the default way of writing an interesting story. But the passive voice is not all bad! Sometimes it is the right choice.

“A lion has eaten the president” is much less effective than “The president has been eaten by a lion”.

This is because the overwhelmingly important subject of the story is the president, not the lion, and you want the president mentioned at the beginning of the story. The passive voice serves better in this case.

So the starting point for news writing is to favour the active voice – and to recognise the comparatively rare occasions when it will be better to use the passive.

But there is another reason to understand the use of the active and passive voices. They do not just affect style and impact, they can also affect meaning.

People in the public eye, particularly politicians, sometimes use the passive voice to obfuscate, confuse and mislead.

The classic example is “mistakes were made”.  From the politicians’ point of view that is better than “I made mistakes” because it sets up uncertainty about what happened.

“I made mistakes and I’m sorry” is a very different statement from “mistakes were made and I regret them”.

In the latter case, the politician leaves open the possibility that the mistakes were made by someone else and his regret could easily be about someone else’s error. Because of the way he has phrased his statement, we cannot tell.

It is the skilful use of the passive voice to evade accountability.

Notice that when politicians describe their successes, they say “We took swift action to deal with the situation”. But when they talk about things that have gone wrong, they use words like “it was considered that…”, or “it was felt necessary….”, distancing themselves from the decision-making process through use of the passive voice.

I remember a philandering politician was asked at his latest wedding whether he would now be a faithful husband. He replied: “When a man marries his mistress, a vacancy is created.”

He was saying, in effect, that he would continue to have extra marital affairs – but in his choice of the passive voice, “a vacancy is created”, he was implying that some external force was creating the new opportunities for infidelity that he would no doubt later take up.

Again, the passive voice suggests the politician is an observer of what is happening, rather than the author of it.

So when you are quoting some public figure, make sure to point out any ambiguities created by his use of the passive voice.

You might want also to look at these thoughts on use of  the passive voice by David Poulson at the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.

The post The active and passive voices in news first appeared on Media Helping Media.

News writing is the opposite.

You start with the essence of the story, for example, let’s imagine the following headline which reads: “The price of cotton has fallen by 15 per cent”.

You then add extra information such as the impact on producers, the textile industry, the economy, consumer prices, employment, etc.

Details such as whether it was expected, what is being done about it, whether it is short- or long-term, and how people are reacting to the news are then added..

A reader or listener can stop after the headline and summary knowing the basic facts.

The person who wants to know more can continue for added information.

Some journalists refer to this method as pyramid journalism, as set out in the graphic above, others refer to it as the inverted pyramid. But no matter how you look at it, the headline is at the top, and more information is added according to its relevance and newsworthiness.

Those who need to understand the essential information will be able to access it in the first few lines, while those who are fascinated by the story can continue reading background information that supports the main thrust of the article. And those who are not that interested will have moved on to another news item.

It’s a simple but effective technique that relies entirely on how well focused you are.

You, the journalist, must decide what the top line is, what comes second, third, and so on.

And you must alway keep in mind that you risk losing your audience if you get too bogged down in detail and offer too much of one kind of information at the expense of other aspects of the story.

In the next lesson we look at the six questions that journalists should ask. What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who.

The text for this lesson was written by John Allen a former executive editor of BBC News. The text is from Media Helping Media and is reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. The graphic at the top is by David Brewer released via Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The post Essential elements of a news story first appeared on Media Helping Media.

This training module was written for a journalism training course in Azerbaijan where those attending had no previous journalism experience or training.

How to construct a news story

A journalist writing a news story is the author, organiser and decision maker. Without them the story may never be told.

They assemble the material they have at hand and which they have researched and uncovered, and then they make the most important decision of all by asking the question – is there a story?

Thousands of possible stories disappear each day because they fail to make it through this first stage of the production process, let’s try to make sure that yours don’t.

If you decide that there is a story, you then need to think through which part or parts of it are of potential interest.

This affects how you should tell the story, what angle you should take and the main points you should try to get across. Perhaps even more importantly, what you can leave out.

There is almost never enough time or space for all your material. Something usually has to go, and it’s best to start thinking about this sooner rather than later.

Despite what you may hear about the objectivity of news, you as the writer cannot help being subjective because you are applying your own judgement and values.

The important thing is that your judgement is not just a personal preference. It is guided and based on journalistic principles.

If you are knocked down by a car and break a leg, a limited number of people will be interested – your family and friends, of course, your employer, your insurance company, and just about nobody else. The incident is unlikely to make a news item.

If the president of your country is involved in a road accident, that is front-page news and probably even the lead item in broadcast news bulletins.

Is a story newsworthy?

The different responses to these two events are a matter of judgement, of news judgement.

A range of considerations comes into play every time you have to decide if a story is newsworthy or not. Here are some of them:

The source: Is it reliable, trustworthy, independent, honest, believable? If you have doubts, can you carry out checks?

The subject: Does it fit my output? If you are writing for a sports magazine, you will probably not be too interested in finance, crime, science, international trade or health, unless there is a sports angle.

The people: What interest is there likely to be in what the individuals in the story are doing? If it’s a choice between you and the president, you lose every time.

The audience: Will this story appeal to many of my readers, viewers, or listeners? There’s not much point in carrying serious financial news in a celebrity-centred popular newspaper.

The surprise: How unusual is this event or development? Something unexpected is more likely to make the news than a routine happening.

The knowledge: Is this story new or has it been published before? If so, by whom? Will it have been widely circulated, or will most people be learning about it for the first time?

The timing: Even if the story is not recent, and the event is many years old, it can still be worth running if the information has only just come to light.

The yawn: Have we just had too many stories on this subject? Let’s look for something else before we lose our audience through boredom?

What next? You have decided to run a story. One of the key stages in preparing it for publication comes next – how do you organise and structure the material?

There are two main models for news writing. One the pyramid, the other involves six honest men. We will deal with this in our next module titled ‘Essential elements of a news story’.

The post News writing for beginners first appeared on Media Helping Media.