Lecture 2 - Telling Factual Stories with Text (Rod Chester)

Rod Chester, a Courier Mail journalist, visited our second lecture to talk to us about how to tell factual stories with text. He started off by showing us some pretty sobering statistics about the decline in newspaper sales in Australia - which was followed by the good news that luckily, Australian still DO buy some newspapers and that written media is not disappearing but rather changing - think online news, social media like Twitter or iPad apps.

When talking about news writing, the ubiquitous Inverted Pyramid has to be mentioned: it shows how a news article should be constructed. First, you write the important stuff (5Ws&H),
which is followed by the important details and in the end are the less important details. Basically, a news story should be written with the thought in mind, that it might get "cut from the bottom".

Chester talked about the other particularities of news writing, such as the formulaic and factual style of writing.

There are different news features, such as personality profiles, human interest stories or backgrounders, to name a few.

He gave us a few tips on how to write a feature story:

-use a thread

-use transition

-use dialogue when possible

-establish a voice

-conclude with a quotation or part of the thread

Chester then showed us numerous examples of how to start/end stories well by using tools such as sarcasm, humor, cliff-hangers or (tweaked) quotes, which was funny and very inspiring.
But the last and most important tips he gave us were:

Read.
Write.

...makes sense!