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…
Journalists who don’t Twitter are “crippling [their] online publishing effort,” says OJR’s Robert Niles. In his view, Twitter is the ideal medium for breaking news and delivers information to readers more efficiently than RSS feeds. But how do you write…
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.
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. …
If you’re using the textbook, you’re already aware that planning is an essential part of the storytelling process. It begins as soon as you have some idea of what your story is about. Having a story plan helps you find…
For many TV reporters, the hardest things to write in any story are the opening and closing lines. The result is that many of the stories you see on the air are really just middles. They don’t get off to…
National Public Radio is reinventing itself as a multimedia news organization, and is retraining its staff for this new mission. In the latest issue of American Journalism Review, Jennifer Doroh reports that NPR hopes to have 450 staffers up to…
You know the old saying: A picture is worth a thousand words. How about a picture of a thousand words (or more)? That’s basically what you get from a “word cloud”–a visual representation of text, with the most frequently used…
Yes, it’s a multimedia world. But the most important skill any journalist brings to the job is the ability to write, says Geoff Dankert, assistant news director at the Fox station in Chicago, WFLD-TV. At this week’s NLGJA conference in…
Here’s yet another use for Twitter: as a tool to help focus your stories. The suggestion comes from former Washington Post editor Craig Stoltz, who says the discipline of writing substantive Tweets helps to reinforce the key journalism skill of…
