1.3: Journalistic Writing Is Different

The red sports car was cruising along the two-lane road on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the driver absorbed in the music of Ed Sheeran, the British popstar who had become the first artist to reach 100 million followers on Spotify.  As Sheeran belted out “Castle on the Hill,” he took his hands of the wheel and began “dancing” to the music spewing from the car’s speakers. 

(Five paragraphs letter) The music enveloped him, and he didn’t notice the semi rounding the curve ahead in the other land.  Slowly, his car began to drift to the left.  Still, he didn’t notice.  There was no grassy median or “Jersey barrier” to let him know he had left his lane. 

It was only when the semi sounded its horn just seconds before the crash that the driver knew he was in peril.

The two vehicles hit with the same force as if the sports car had hit a brick wall at 125 m.p.h.  Two of his passengers, who didn’t have their seat belts on, were thrown from the vehicle.  One ended up in a ditch.  The other in the roadway the driver had left.  A semi ran over the body of his friend. 

As for the driver, he survived, but he was scrunched in his seat as the front of the semi pushed the sports car’s engine into the passenger compartment.

 

That might be fine writing for a creative writing class, but it is terrible journalistic writing.  Generally, when people read or listen to a news report they want the most important details right away:

 

Two people were killed and a third critically injured when a red sports car apparently drifted into the wrong land on U.S. 13 in Princess Anne, a town on Maryland’s Eastern shore.

Police said the car, driven by ….

 

 You see how this gets right to the point?  It doesn’t set the scene, it just tells the result. People who were stuck in the resulting 2-hour traffic jam on U.S. 13 can find out what the cause was if they read or hear the news report.

 

Now, take a look at this press release distributed by EurekaAlert! a press release distribution service operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

 

News Release 23-Dec-2022

A seventeen-year landmark study finds that group meditation decreases US national stress

World Journal of Social Science publishes study showing that group practice of the TM and TM-Sidhi techniques by √1% of a population decreased multiple stress indicators in the U.S.. Scientists call for a group to create world peace.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Maharishi International University

 

 

image: Size of the MIU TM and TM Sidhi group (blueline), eight indices of stress in the United States represented by the lines in different colors, and the US stress index, the mean of all eight variables indicated by the red line. view more 

Credit: Maharishi International University

Every year during 2000 to 2006 there were tens of thousands of stress-related tragedies in the U.S. Official statistics from the FBI and Centers for Disease Control indicate that there were 15,440 murders, 93,438 rapes, and 86,348 child and adolescent deaths from accidents each year to give a few examples. The current study is the longest and most comprehensive of 50 studies to demonstrate what has been named the Maharishi Effect, in honor of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and Maharishi International University (MIU) founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

The results can be seen in the chart below. The blue line indicates that during the Baseline period of 2000 to 2006 the size of the TM and TM-Sidhi group located at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa increased to reach the √1% of the U.S. population (1725 people) and stayed there for five years during the Demonstration period from 2007 to 2011. All stress indicators immediately started decreasing. In the Post period when the size of the group size began to decline the rate of decrease in stress slowed and then it reversed and began to increase.

SOURCE:  https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/975329 (2022, December 26).

 

Do you understand what the release is trying to say?  Neither do I.  And neither would most editors or news producers in the U.S. Whatever message Maharishi University hoped to get out was lost in the first paragraph. 

 

Compare that to this news release, also distributed the very same day by EurekAlert:

 

News Release 23-Dec-2022

Soaring fertilizer prices could see millions more undernourished

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Edinburgh

 

High fertiliser prices could put an additional 100 million people at risk of undernourishment, a study suggests.

The war in Ukraine has led to the blockade of millions of tonnes of wheat, barley and corn, but reduced food exports from the region are less of a driver of food price rises than feared, researchers say.

Instead, a modelling study led by University of Edinburgh researchers suggests surging energy and fertiliser prices will have by far the greatest impact on food security in coming decades.

Until now, how energy and fertiliser price rises and export restrictions affects future global food prices was poorly understood. There has also been little analysis to quantify the scale of harm that hikes in the price of food could have on human nutritional health and the environment.

Do you see the difference?  Do you see how the University of Edinburgh release gets your attention with a pretty startling statistic in the first paragraph and in the fourth paragraph explains why this study is significant.  And how it is written in simple, plain English that nearly anyone can understand.

Now, take a look at the abstract of the actual study, which was published in the journal Nature Food: 

            https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00659-9

Do you see how the news release was written to make it understandable by members of the general public, while the abstract was written in a more “academic” style. 

The point is this:  You have to write for your audience.  The writing style you are taught in English composition is fine for what it’s intended for.  The writing style you are taught in Creative Writing is fine for creative writing.  Academics learn a particular writing style, and so do lawyers.  And the writing style taught by journalism and public relations instructors is best for conveying messages to the general public.

Journalistic writing is intended for mass consumption, and the fact is, even today, the “mass” isn’t all that well educated.  Less than 40% of the American public has a college degree.  That’s a considerable improvement over the 1930s, however, when only about 4% of the population had a college degree. 

To write for people who have a relatively low level of education, one must write simply. Short sentences.  Words that are easy to understand.  It turns out, however, that the better educated population appreciates the same thing.  They want to be able to absorb the news of the day quickly and easily.  The Ph.D. in economics, for instance, doesn’t want to try to figure out what the Ph.D. in biology is saying.

U.S. newspapers traditionally have geared their writing toward an eighth grader, not toward a high school graduate, much less a college graduate.  There’s a historical reason for this: Until the first GI Bill was passed after World War II, very few people went to college, and in fact, most Americans did not graduate from high school.

Even papers you might have thought would have well-educated audiences typically aimed for simplicity in writing.  Bernard Kilgore, who transformed The Wall Street Journal from a 34,000-circulation trade paper to the nation’s first national newspaper with 775,000 subscribers and over 1 million readers during the 25 years before his death, constantly reminded his reporters and editors, “We have to make it easy for the reader, because the easiest thing for the reader to do is quit reading,” and that they were writing for “the little old lady in Des Moines in tennis shoes.”

That advice still applies: Make it easy for the reader and write for someone who isn’t an expert.

Is it local?

 

As this chapter was being written, an immense tragedy was unfolding in the area around Buffalo, N.Y.  Pictures of downtown showed cars buried in snow. Police said 28 people thus far had died, some trapped in their cars for 48 hours or more.  The Washington Post gave it about 10 inches on the front page; The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News and the (Louisville) Courier-Journal gave it no front-page coverage.

 

Why?  Because there wasn’t a local angle.  As far as those newspapers knew, no one from their community had died in the storm, so the assumption was that no one in their circulation area was particularly interested. 

 

It’s the same reason The Washington Post doesn’t report cattle prices.  The number of people in the Washington, D.C., area who raise cattle is very small.  And that’s the reason the Baltimore Sun devotes space to covering the Maryland State Fair, even though the Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa state fairs are much larger.  Newspapers and radio-tv outlets are mass media, and if a story isn’t of interest to a mass of readers or viewers, it won’t get covered.

 

This changes a bit when you start talking about trade publications – those which are written and edited for people in a specific line of work.  Usually their coverage area is national, but “local” means the people in that trade

 

How does this affect public relations practitioners?  It affects where you attempt to place a story.  If an event is happening in Largo, Md., the media that serve Largo – everything from a small local paper to the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner to the major D.C. broadcasting outlets are potential outlets for your news. 

 

We’ll discuss story placement in a later chapter.

 

Next: The inverted pyramid, the five W’s and AP style.