Student journalists get experience on a ...

The morning meeting One of the best ways to get experience as a journalist is to, well, act like a journalist. It helps to have equipment and trusted advisors on hand to make sure you don’t libel anyone or miss the best angle. In the Journalism department at Sheffield University we organise regular ‘newsdays’ for the postgraduate students. They have a meeting to discuss the stories they’ll cover then they’re off! This semester the broadcast students are sharing their newsdays with the print and web students on alternate weeks. They...

This is what happens when a news story i...

Instead of taking you through this piece line by line and pointing out the personal opinion, spelling and grammar errors – not to mention the awkward phrasing – I thought I’d show you instead. Do let me know if I’ve missed...

The importance of responsible juxtaposit...

I want you to look at this screenshot as you would normally look at a webpage and tell me what you look at first: Screen shot of Sky News story on 10 March 2010 Do you, as I did, look at the image first then let your eye travel up to the headline? How many people don’t look at the headline? You could easily think this chap is Jon Venables – when the entire point of the article is to say he isn’t. Words are important but visually they’re not as strong as a photo or image on the page. It’s an obvious choice to put these two photos together but...

Is this news?...

All news websites aim to attract a wide audience, which may be one of the reasons why they are keen to include both hard news along with feature pieces. Most readers would associate a feature article with a magazine but the web allows this cross over to be more acceptable. With both styles playing a role on news sites I am finding it increasing difficult to decide whether a piece is a news story or a feature article. So, how can you tell you’re reading a news article? The role of a title in a news article is to plainly inform the reader of the story that is about to be...