Making Significant News, Interesting and Relevant

Journalists must make the significant interesting and relevant. Journalism is storytelling with a purpose. It should do more than gather an audience or catalogue the important. According to Journalism.org, for its own survival, journalism must balance what readers know they want, with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.

The effectiveness of a piece of journalism is measured both by how much a work engages its audience and enlightens it. This means journalists must continually ask what information has most value to citizens and in what form. While journalism should reach beyond such topics as government and public safety, a journalism overwhelmed by trivia and false significance ultimately engenders a trivial society. To make important news stories interesting to audiences, one must write the piece as a great story with human experience intertwined in it.

Storytelling and information are not contradictory. The Neiman report explains that they are better understood as two points on a continuum of communication... Most journalism, like most communication, exists in the middle. The journalists’ task is to find the way to make the significant interesting for each story and finding the right mix of the serious and the less serious that offers an account of the day. Journalism is an art of making potentially boring, but important topics interesting and appealing to readers.

http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102547/Journalists-Must-Make-the-Significant-Interesting-and-Relevant.aspx

http://www.visualwriter.com/Journalism/NewsStory.htm

Making News Comprehensive and Proportional

Journalists must make the news comprehensive and proportional. The Neiman reports encourage us to think of journalism as mapmaking. This helps us see that proportion and comprehensiveness are key to accuracy. The Neiman reports give an example, Journalists who devote far more time and space to a sensational trial or celebrity scandal than they know it deserves, because they think it will sell, are like cartographers who drew England and Spain the size of Greenland because it was popular.

Comprehensiveness and proportion are also important because the public relies on journalists to tell them what the next big trend will be. Keeping news in proportion and not leaving important things out are also cornerstones of truthfulness. According to Journalism.org, journalism really is a form of cartography: it creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.

As we refer to journalism as a form of mapping, we must remember that the map should also include news of all our communities, not just those with attractive demographics. This kind of news coverage is best achieved by newsrooms with a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. Those going into the managerial side of journalism should remember that a diverse newsroom means better proportion over all.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102548/Journalists-Should-Keep-the-News-in-Proportion-and-Make-It-Comprehensive.aspx

http://www.journalism.org/resources/principles

http://new-york-real-estate-law.com/blog/2011/11/cccs-seminar-keeping-things-in-proportion-section-72-of-the-victorian-charter-post-momcilovic-and-in-comparative-perspective/

Journalists and their Conscience

Journalists have a responsibility to exercise their personal conscience. Poynter News university describes conscious journalism as the following: It is time for a journalism that perseveres in spite of hostile forces. It is time for a journalism that believes in doing the right thing. It is time for a journalism that desires to help the undesirable. It is time for a journalism that never forgets the forgotten. It is time for a journalism that cares.

The Nieman reports say every journalist from the newsroom to the boardroom, must have a personal sense of ethics and responsibility, a moral compass. Journalists have a responsibility to voice their personal conscience out loud and allow others around them to do so as well. Countless hurdles make it difficult for journalists to produce news that is accurate, fair, balanced, citizen focused, independent-minded, and courageous. But the effort is pointless without an open flow of ideas that allows people to challenge one another’s assumptions, perceptions, and prejudices.

According to Rediff reports, "In a sense, journalists are the conscience keepers of society, pointing out what is wrong not only with the administration and government but also the society at large," As the fourth estate of government, journalists have so much power to frame. However, conscious lacking journalists in the past have made it so many citizens don’t trust what they read… There is a call and responsibility for journalists to become agents of change.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102549/Journalists-Have-an-Obligation-to-Personal-Conscience.aspx

http://www.rediff.com/news/report/journalists-are-conscience-keepers-of-society-pm/20110212.htm

http://www.poynter.org/archived/my-take/80220/a-call-for-conscience-journalism/