Crash course in Journalism: Lesson 3: A fresh set of eyes
Note: this post is a part of a crash course in journalism. If this is the first post from the series you encountered, it is highly recommended to start the course from the beginning.
Links to previous lessons:
Lesson number one: Buy a notebook
Imagine you are a journalist who is working in a newspaper, and the editor sends you to a field assignment. You have to cover the bringing to the court of a defendant in a high profile case. You are full of adrenaline and eager to do a good job, but you soon discover this is not really such a great story. Both the defense attorneys and the prosecution team refuse to talk to the press, no new revelations, no big news. The whole thing is just the regular corny stuff.
What are you going to do? You can't come back without a story.
If you want to tell a news story right, any news story, you have to stand by three commitments: to the readers, to the truth and to yourself. Your readers want a good story. They want you to tell them something they do not already know, and they want you to do it in an engaging way. But you are also obliged to tell the story in a truthful manner and you have to tell it from your own point of view. So how do you go about it? Especially when the story does not jump at you and hit you on the nose?
Rule number one of Journalistic field work: Always look for a fresh angle.
The same story can be retold again and again, and every time from a different perspective. You see, the main thing to remember about your commitments is that all the three of them are complex things. Your audience is complex. The truth is complex. You are complex.
We approach every situation with pre-judgment, there is no way around it. It is the way our minds work. But as a journalist, you have to let yourself be surprised. You have to approach the situation you are going to write about with a fresh set of eyes. And then you may see that the story in that court yard, is actually the defendant's wife, standing somewhat away from the crowd, with a little baby in her arms.
Before I give you exercise number 2, just another note about the exercises. They are not mandatory and don’t have a deadline. Again, they are meant to provide feedback. So take your time, just remember to mention for what lesson they are.
So exercise number 2, is very simple. I am asking you to write just one sentence of the form:
Today I saw x in y for the first time
Where y is a place you go by every day, for example, some place on your way to work, and x is something new you discovered about that place. Seems easy, right? But remember your sentence should be engaging, true, and from your own perspective.
One sentence. You can submit the answers as replies to this post.
Good luck!
