Okay, I admit it. I’m a grammar-and-spelling nut. And I think it’s critically important for journalists to get it right. In my view, “little” mistakes on the air, in print or online matter because they can dent our credibility. After all, if we can’t manage subject-verb agreement, what else might we be getting wrong?
College journalism [...]
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Shocking! Tragic! Unbelievable!
Not the stories that came with those labels attached, but the way they’re written. It’s shocking how many worthless adjectives are being crammed [...]
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Multimedia journalism is a lot like baseball, the way the Tom Hanks character describes it in the movie A League of Our Own. “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.”
But with practice and coaching, you can improve your baseball skills. The same goes for multimedia journalism.
I’m often asked [...]
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Smaller staffs, shorter deadlines and more platforms to feed. Is it any wonder mistakes get on the air and online? In today’s short-handed, 24/7 newsrooms, it’s more important than ever for anyone involved in producing content to double check it for accuracy. Don’t think someone else will catch even the most obvious errors. They [...]
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Language is always changing, so it’s no surprise to find a few new words in the latest edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Among this year’s additions are two media terms: vlog and webisode. But the simple fact that a word is in the dictionary doesn’t make it suitable for use in a news story. Some [...]
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YouTube’s new Reporter’s Center is already getting lots of attention from journalism bloggers and the 30 or so videos posted there have already garnered more than 100,000 views.
The YouTube Reporters’ Center is a new resource to help you learn more about how to report the news. It features some of the nation’s top journalists and [...]
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Tom Hallman, Jr. is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who conducts narrative writing seminars for the Society of Professional Journalism and writes a column for SPJ’s Quill magazine. This month he wrote about what separates a great story from a good one, and though they’re geared primarily to print reporters, most of his comments make a lot of [...]
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Its really a shame the apostrophe doesn’t get it’s fair share of love. See the glaring errors? John Richards would. He’s a retired British journalist and founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, an organization devoted to just one cause: saving the much-abused little punctuation mark.
Richards told the Washington Post’s John Kelley that he sees errors [...]
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Is it ever okay to copy someone else’s writing style? KARE-TV reporter Boyd Huppert, one of the finest writers in the business, says it’s actually a good way to develop your own.
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Writing is hard work, no matter what your medium. As the German novelist Thomas Mann once said, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Journalist Gene Fowler joked, “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood [...]
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