Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
1.
Photo Caption Lists are News Articles Too
Throughout this course, my personal definition of news articles has expanded. I had
originally thought of journalism articles as hard-facts stories telling the unbiased who and
what and where. Opinion pieces, photo lists, and restraint reviews were classified as
something other, something not-news. Now, I have learned about the categories of hard
and soft news and their places in journalism. Hard news covers immediate
who/what/why/when/where/how facts while soft news is more commentary and
storytelling. Both of these pieces are vital to journalism’s goal of keeping the public
informed. Hard news and soft news could be considered genres, as they are actions and
structures that journalists utilize to make meaning to their audience. One type of article
does not fit all stories. Some stories require unbiased factual relaying, while some stories
can be in creative formats and individual styles. When writing our first articles, I
attempted to make both hard and soft news style articles on the topic of study abroad. I
found rather quickly that there was not much of a hard news story to study abroad
preparations and memories. There was nothing immediate or factually intriguing about
such aspects. However, soft news style articles held endless possibilities for the topic of
stories from study abroad. I could directly insert people’s own words and relevant
pictures into my article. Though if felt less formal, I was still practicing journalism.
Creating a photo captions list with my group similarly did not feel like traditional
journalism, but we were actually writing a soft news piece.