Chapter 7 Week 7

1. Every newspaper aims to attract a different educational level of readers. The Australian aims to attract a more educated audience such as university graduates, while my local paper the Herald, aims to attract an audience of a lower educational level. The Herald uses simple jargon to appeal to its target audience.

2. The job of journalists is to report news to the public. Journalists should not be able to interpret news stories too much as the readers should be able to read a non-bias report and form an opinion of their own. If a journalist puts forward their opinion, many readers will simply agree with that opinion.

3. It is important to be able to differentiate between Australian and American language. While formal language should not be lost to colloquial language such as "g'day", it is important to continue to write and speak traditionally when reporting news.

4. There a many corrections published every day in newspapers proving that newspapers do have some commitment to accuracy.

5. I would contact the people affected by the inaccuracy and appologise and assure them the mistake would be fixed in the next paper to be published.


Points of Interest:

- News stories are usually written in the past tense, while feature articles are usually written in the present tense. News stories are stories which inform readers of things that have happened therefore it is obvious that they should be written in the past tense, because the events being reported have already happened, they are in the past.

- News language is not conversational, news writing requires precision and efficiency. It is important for news articles to be clear, consise and accurate. News articles must give accurate account of events without any hint of the opinion of the writer's opinion on the matter, therefore news writing should not be conversational ie. 'yesterday i saw a fat man eat an icecream', instead it should be written 'yesterday a man ate an icecream'.

- A journalist must know their readers in order to write their stories in a way that appeals to the readers interests. The main aim of newspapers is to sell papers. The writer must know the readers interests etc. Then the writer must use this knowledge to appeal to their potential readers by writing in a style which is relatable to potential readers.