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 into the average newscast! Tragic to think that many writers may not know better.…
When it comes to writing, what works on TV or in print doesn’t necessarily work on the Web. Stories that begin with an anecdotal lead may send online readers clicking away, if they can’t figure out quickly what the story…
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…
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…
One of the criticisms leveled at TV news sites is the hit-or-miss quality of the writing. Part of the problem, as many in the broadcast industry freely admit, is a discomfort with or lack of knowledge about writing in “print style.” One tool that…
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…
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…
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…
Most television Web sites have left the age of shovelware behind, thank goodness. It took a while, but stations finally figured out that simply posting TV scripts online wouldn’t entice anyone to visit a site twice. That said, there’s still…
If you aren’t already reading any of Jakob Nielsen’s work about online writing, you should start. Just recently he published his pick for the news organization with the best Web headlines. And the winner is….the BBC. According to Nielsen, good headlines should…
