One potential field I’m
considering pursuing a career in is the media/news field. So, I thought that a
few scripts and articles would be great artifacts to analyze for this project.
I chose three broadcast news scripts, one teleprompter script for a news
anchor, and one newspaper (a campus newspaper from the school I transferred
from) where I plan to analyze a few articles within, as well as the newspaper
as a whole.
First things first, all of these artifacts fall within
the same [general] genre: news, information, “story-telling” to some degree.
Even though news can be told in print, broadcast, and multimedia form, it’s
usually very easy to distinguish something in the news genre. News, in contrast
with many other genres, usually doesn’t care too much about the author’s
personal opinion, instead using quotes and facts to tell the story.
Newspaper articles, television and radio scripts, as well
as teleprompter scripts all have the same purpose, regardless of whether the
audience is reading, listening, or watching. Though my artifacts all serve the
same general purpose, there are a few differences worth discussing for the sake
of analyzing. The scripts are, generally, meant to not only inform, but engage
the viewer and get them interested in the topic enough to wait for the actual
segment to be aired. For example, one of my scripts is a news anchor’s
introduction: “Tonight on the Channel 4 news……..” This introduction serves as the
starter to the news segment, much like a newspaper’s front page. Their purpose
is to inform, engage the readers/listeners/viewers, and present them with
facts, and not opinion unless it’s an opinion piece of news or a talk show. In
contrast with creative writing or work of fiction where the purpose can be to
inform but is usually more for entertainment/leisure, news writing’s purpose is
to inform and engage, as well as forming a bond with the audience to ensure
they are loyal.
Next, the audience within the artifacts can vary. In the
case of my artifacts, the television scripts are intended for the news crew who
will translate the script for the television audience, while the newspaper is
intended for a different kind of audience. Some people like to read their news,
some people like to listen/watch their news. What these audiences have in
common is they are choosing to be informed by news, not a short-story, or book
of poetry; the audience wants information of some kind. Another key aspect of
the news rhetoric is the inevitable fact that most publications/news stations
rely heavily on viewers and readers to keep their organizations afloat, so it’s
important that viewers get what they expect: which, again, is information, even
if it’s told in an entertaining way.
My artifacts all definitely have conventions which follow
the news writing genre. Firstly, due to the nature of news, the ethos concept
is extremely relevant to the entire genre. To establish the ethos credibility,
newspapers boldly display the name of the publication on the front cover, and
also provide bylines which tell the name of the author and other relevant
information, such as date and time of publication. In addition, my script
artifacts all do the same: the news anchor script immediately lets the viewers
know what news station they are watching, which establishes the ethos concept.
In addition to the convention of establishing
credibility, the artifacts all adhere to a more-formal style of writing. The
conventions of news writing greatly differ from other forms of writing based
off of this alone; the omission of opinion in articles and segments, replaced
with quotes and factual figures, are a convention not many genres of writing
use, although definitely not exclusive to news writing. Also, the
‘story-telling’ involved with scripts and articles is conventional, as is the
use of descriptive and vivid language.
Another convention of news-writing is the use of
attribution. Because news-writing is the telling of facts to tell the story,
it’s crucial to state where this information is coming from, because it usually
isn’t coming directly from the writer/anchor.
The tone of my artifacts all definitely have something in common:
they may be playful and engaging depending on the audience and type of news, but
the tone screams purpose, and formality. Like I stated earlier, news-writing
typically takes on a more-formal tone, and within my artifacts this is
expressed by the diction and syntax. Most of the language used in my artifacts
is authoritative; it’s less colloquial and casual, but proper and systematic.
You instantly recognize you’re reading something that somebody had to be
trained and conditioned on, as opposed to reading a blog post which is more
relaxed and casual. The syntax adheres to conventional news-writing styles,
which is one aspect of news-writing that makes it so recognizable. The scripts
are laid out in two/three column displays, indicating which words are meant to
be spoken by the on-air anchor, or meant to be performed by those behind the
scenes (director, producer, technical director, etc).
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