WHEN LIFE SEEKS TO IMITATE ART, REGRETTABLE DECISIONS ARE MADE. THIS WAS THE CASE LAST NIGHT, WHEN 14-YEAR-OLD JORDAN COKE-AN-HOUR FIRST WATCHED THE POPULAR FILM "ANCHORMAN," AND DECIDED THAT SHE WANTED TO -QUOTE- BE JUST LIKE RON BURGANDY- WHEN SHE GREW UP. IT'S PART OF AN EPIDEMIC THAT'S BEEN SWEEPING THE NATION- BROADCAST JOURNALISM IS SUDDENLY BACK IN STYLE. WE CAN ONLY HOPE THAT THE 70'S CLOTHING SEEN IN THE FILM, WILL NOT FOLLOW.
Alright, so I didn't form my entire future career plans solely off my impressions of a Will Ferrell movie, but to the best of my recollection, it was the first time that the idea of broadcasting as a viable career path occurred to me. Decades ago, there was a spike of aspiring Woodwards and Bernsteins who entered journalism school after viewing "All the President's Men," so why shouldn't the comparably popular "Anchorman" inspire the same sentiment?
Over the course of the past semester, I've found myself enjoying subsequent viewings of the film, and it's 'lost' bootleg version even more than usual. A week ago, it dawned on me just how accurately constructed some of the faux-reports that "Anchorman" produced really are.
Wait... did Brian Fantana just start his broadcast in the present tense? It's mildly disconcerting that a fictional news reporter who wears Sex Panther perfume knew more about how to properly construct TV copy than I did.
"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig
to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
"Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
"The old man was dreaming about the lions."
"Tell me how free I am."
"He loved Big Brother."
"P.S.
Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise."
The quotes above, as you may have noticed, are all the final lines to some of the most famous novels in literature. But without the text which precedes them, they are without any resonance or significance. With no introduction, they are essentially without merit. Which is why...
lolcat Translation: Order matters.
Without order in writing, we might find out that Sonny Corleone was whacked before we wee him become Don. We might known that Frodo destroyed the ring, before we are aware that he set out on his quest. Or in a slightly less epic, yet more personal scenario, that the sheriff is frustrated before we know what exactly he is frustrated about. On my midterm exam, I committed the cardinal sin of neglecting to make my second paragraph pertain to my lead. Even though at this point in my writing, my leads were more direct and informational, the crucial bridge between them, and the story that followed was still lacking. It's easier to look at writing an article as filling in the missing sections of an equation; breaking it down into the lead, the 2nd paragraph followup to the lead and the third paragraph quotation.
When I signed up for "Writing for Mass Communication," I wasn't entirely aware that I had agreed to take a course on a foreign language. But on the first days of class, when people around me began throwing around crazy words like "participle," "conjunction," and "pronunverb," (maybe not that last one) I began questioning whether I really spoke the English language at all. When something called the "passive voice" was introduced, I was officially lost. However, four or five classes and several poorly received assignments after it was originally introduced, I finally began to understand what it meant. My extent of grammar experience prior to this class was limited to the five or six "Schoolhouse Rock" videos I watched in 2nd grade, so I figured that I would go back to the source material and apply it to this new material:
Notice what I did at the end there? That's a transition, because now I'm moving on to talk about an essential element of journalism that I am still struggling to work in to my writing today; objectivity. You see, my standards of engaging journalism might be a bit different from what the typical communications professor (you) might dictate are appropriate.
Pictured: Quality Journalism
So it's still a constant fight to make sure that words that have the potential to make my writing interesting, albeit opinionated, stay out of the picture. I've found that the best way to censure myself on this issue is by sticking to the original 5 W's of journalism: who, what, when, where and why. If I view each article around this basic structure, I am more capable of telling a straightforward piece of news, rather than embellishing it to fit a particular frame. Using the 5 W's can also give the reader a quick lowdown on the information you are covering, without losing their attention by throwing in unnecessary details. To show how this principle works, I've taken one of my favorite movies: "The Lion King," and trimmed the first "act" (it is based on "Hamlet after all) down to the W's. The first 40 minutes of the movie can be summed up in 1:13 when this is completed. (And I left in extra time to show the monkeys and the elephants. Just because they're awesome.)
Basically, the best thing that a journalist can do for their article is make is short and sweet (And not use cliches). Although sentences with enough commas to make the paragraph look like it has severe teenage acne may work in a term paper, or one of those scholarly journals that no one really reads, an excess of them in a news report demeans its overall value. One of my most notable offenses of this was in the recent assignment asking us to write a letter to the editor. I wrote a whopper 70 word, and 3 comma'ed sentence that consumed the greater part of the letter itself. By instead presenting my points one at a time, rather than in a rushing torrent of opinion, I would have made a far more effective case.
Being short worked out fine for the munchkins, so why shouldn't it work for me?
