what is an journalistic essay

The Art of Journalistic Writing: A Comprehensive Guide ✍️

Journalistic writing aims to provide accurate and objective news coverage to the audience. Learn how to write like journalists in this comprehensive guide.

In the fast-paced realm of freelance writing, captivating and informative articles are the key to setting yourself apart from the competition. That's where the art of journalistic writing becomes your secret weapon. 

Below, we'll delve into the significance of journalistic writing for Independents, demystify its definition and various types, explore its essential features, and provide you with invaluable tips to sharpen your skills. Get ready to unlock the power of journalistic writing and take your freelance career to new heights . Let's dive in and discover the magic behind compelling stories that captivate readers worldwide.

What is journalistic writing? 📝 

Journalistic writing, as the name implies, is the style of writing used by journalists and news media organizations to share news and information about local, national, and global events, issues, and developments with the public.

The main goal of journalistic writing is to provide accurate and objective news coverage. Journalists gather facts, conduct research, and interview sources to present a fair and unbiased account of events. They strive to deliver information clearly, concisely, and interestingly that grabs readers’ attention and helps them understand the subject.

Journalistic writing also encourages public discussion, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. Since journalists present diverse perspectives, analyze complex issues, and investigate misconduct, they empower readers to form opinions and actively engage with the news. Journalistic writing acts as a watchdog, holding institutions and individuals accountable and promoting transparency in society.

Types of journalistic writing 🔥

Different types of journalism writing styles serve unique purposes, from exposing truths to keeping us informed, sparking conversations, and providing meaningful insights into the world around us. 

Here are five types of journalistic writing you should know about:

Investigative journalism 🕵️

Investigative journalists are like detectives in the news world. They dive deep into topics, dedicating their time and resources to uncover hidden information, expose corruption, and bring wrongdoing to the surface.

News journalism 🗞️

News journalists are frontline reporters who inform people about the latest happenings. They cover a wide range of topics, from politics and the economy to science and entertainment. They gather facts, interview sources, and present unbiased information objectively and concisely.

Column journalism 📰

In column journalism, writers share their personal opinions and perspectives on various subjects. They offer analysis, commentary, and insights on social, cultural, or political issues. Whether they are experts in their fields or well-known figures with unique voices, their columns provide readers with different standpoints and spark thought-provoking discussions.

Feature writing 🙇 

Feature writers take us beyond the basic facts and immerse us in storytelling. They explore human-interest stories, profiles, and in-depth features on specific topics. They also delve into the personal lives, experiences, or achievements of individuals or communities, providing a deeper understanding of the subject matter by using narrative techniques.

Reviews journalism 📖

Reviewers are the guides helping us make informed decisions about the arts. They evaluate and critique films, books, music, theater shows, and more. Through their opinions and assessments, they analyze the quality, impact, and significance of creative works. Review journalism not only helps us choose what to watch, read, or listen to, but it also contributes to cultural conversations and discussions.

Key features of journalistic writing 🔑

Journalistic writing distinguishes itself from other forms of writing through several essential characteristics. And here are a few: 

• Accuracy and objectivity: These are of utmost importance. Journalists go to great lengths to gather reliable information, verify sources, and present a balanced perspective. They strive to separate facts from opinions, ensuring readers receive an accurate account of events.
• Timeliness and relevance: Journalists focus on current events and issues that are of interest to the public. They aim to provide up-to-date information, sharing the latest developments and their implications.
• Clarity and conciseness: Journalists use clear and simple language, avoiding complex jargon that might confuse the audience. They use short sentences and paragraphs that enhance readability.
• Inverted pyramid structure: Commonly employed in journalistic writing, this structure places the most important information at the beginning of the article –– in the headline and the first paragraph. Subsequent paragraphs contain supporting details arranged in descending order of significance. By adopting this approach, journalists enable readers to grasp the main points quickly and decide whether to delve deeper into the topic.
• Engagement and impact: Journalists leverage various storytelling techniques, such as vivid descriptions and compelling narratives, to captivate their audience. They incorporate quotes, anecdotes, and human-interest elements to evoke emotions among readers and make the story relatable.

How to write like a journalist: 7 tips 💯

Now that you know the ins and outs of journalistic style and storytelling, let’s explore the best practices to follow during news writing: 

1. Use the inverted pyramid structure 🔻

If you’re wondering how to structure and write a news story or article, the answer is simple: Go from the most important to the least important. Start your articles with vital facts, and arrange supporting details in descending order of significance. This structure ensures readers receive essential information even if they don’t read the entire piece.

2. Establish your angle 📐

 Before you begin writing , determine the angle or perspective you want to take on the story. Although you should share a neutral opinion, choosing an angle helps you stay focused and deliver a clear message. Consider what makes your story unique or newsworthy, and shape your narrative accordingly.

3. Stick to the facts 🩹

Journalistic writing values accuracy and objectivity. Present information verifiable and supported by credible sources, and avoid personal opinions and biases –– allowing the facts to speak for themselves. Fact-checking is essential to maintain the integrity of your writing.

4. Use quotations to generate credibility 💭

Including quotes from reliable sources adds credibility and depth to your writing. Interview relevant individuals, experts, or eyewitnesses to gather their perspectives and insights. Incorporate their direct quotes to support your narrative and provide first-hand accounts.

5. Write clear and concise sentences 💎

Use straightforward language to effectively communicate your message. Journalism articles typically only include one-to-three sentences per paragraph and should not exceed 20 words per sentence. 

6. Edit and revise 💻

Thorough editing is crucial to produce polished and professional journalistic pieces. So once you finish your first draft, invest time on editing and revising your work. Look for grammatical errors, clarity issues, and redundancies. And ensure your writing flows smoothly and maintains a consistent tone. 

7. Maintain ethical standards 🏅

You want repeat readers who’ll come back for more from you. And for that, you must keep in mind journalistic principles and share fair, trusting, and accountable pieces. Attribute information to appropriate sources, respect privacy when necessary, and conduct thorough fact-checking.

Write like a pro with Contra 🌟

Mastering the art of journalistic writing is the key to becoming a skilled and impactful freelance writer . By understanding the criticality of thorough research, engaging storytelling, and holding the powerful accountable, you can create compelling news stories that resonate with readers. 

And with Contra as your trusted companion, you'll have the tools and resources to refine your journalistic writing skills and take your freelance career to new heights. So don't miss out on the opportunity to write like a pro. Sign up with Contra today, promote your services commission-free, and connect with fellow writers. 

Check out Contra for Independents , and join our Slack community to interact with a supportive network of writers, sharing knowledge and learning from each other.

How to Write an Op-Ed: A Guide to Effective Opinion Writing 🖋️

Related articles.

Crafting an Informative Essay: A Comprehensive Guide 📝

What Is Content Writing? Tips to Craft Engaging Content 👀

The 12 Rules Of Grammar Everyone Should Know ✍️

Mastering the White Paper Format: A Step-by-Step Guide 📝

How to Give Effective Feedback and Motivate Others 💪

• Remote Working & Freelancing

Start your independent journey

Hire top independents

How to Write a Journalistic Essay

Jessica cook.

A journalistic essay is a combination of journalistic reporting and personal essay writing. A newspaper article contains straight journalistic reporting most of the time, while a personal essay tells a story. In a journalistic essay, you must combine these elements in order to tell a story with a factual basis in reporting.

Do your research. The basis of a journalistic essay must be factual; you should use your skills as a journalist to interview the people involved with the story you want to tell and research any available background information. Record interviews, take notes, and spend time at the library or online researching the information you need for the story. Take photos as you conduct your research so you can add them to your essay or at least use them to help you remember important information.

Organize your facts. Begin your essay by outlining your factual information and organizing it in a manner that is easy to understand. You do not always have to tell a story in chronological order; instead, consider how to tell the story in a way that will keep your readers interested from beginning to end.

Write your essay in a clear and concise manner. Avoid overly flowery or confusing sentences; you should strive to make your point clear, not to impress your reader with your vast vocabulary skills.

Let the story be the important part of your essay, not your writing. Your writing should showcase the story in the best light, hooking your reader's interest and keeping it until the end.

• 1 The Guardian: How Journalists Write, by Peter Cole

Related Articles

How to Write a Simple Personal Biography

What Is a Perspective Essay?

How to Make an Outline for an Informative Essay

True or False: Mars Edition

How to Make a Good Introduction Paragraph

How to Start an Informative Paper

How to Write Book Titles in an Essay

The Difference Between Narrative & Non-Narrative Writing

Characteristics of Narrative Essays

How to Write a Historical Narrative

How to Write a Conclusion in My Nursing Paper

How to Write an Essay on Personal Interests & Career...

What Is a Hook Paragraph in an Essay?

How to Make a Story Look Like It Is a Newspaper Article

How to Write an Essay Abstract

How to Write a 10th Grade Book Report

Good Ways to Start an Essay

English Grammar and the Structure of a Narrative Paragraph

What Is a Narrative Response?

How to Write a Book Report in the 6th Grade

Regardless of how old we are, we never stop learning. Classroom is the educational resource for people of all ages. Whether you’re studying times tables or applying to college, Classroom has the answers.

• Accessibility
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Copyright Policy
• Manage Preferences

© 2020 Leaf Group Ltd. / Leaf Group Media, All Rights Reserved. Based on the Word Net lexical database for the English Language. See disclaimer .

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

What's the difference between academic and journalistic writing?

I'm not talking about "boring" academic papers that are 99% science and 0% interesting. But in comments on a draft of my senior thesis, my teacher made the comment that my writing style was quite "journalistic" and ought to be more academic.

I assume that a journalistic writing style is a bit more sensational, perhaps, but what are the differences between journalistic writing and academic writing? Since writing is often concerned with different scopes (paper, section, paragraph, sentence, etc.), what differences manifest themselves in different scopes? Obviously an academic paper is largely different from a journalistic one, but as the scope narrows, what are the specific differences?

Edit: Note, I'm not asking how to improve my paper or what a thesis looks like - I'm asking a general question of the stylistic difference between types of writing.

• academic-writing

• 3 Since it is the tutor who has drawn you in to this confusion, why don't you directly ask this from your tutor? You can gain more knowledge and even discuss with him / her to clarify each and every doubtful areas. :-) –  user18951 Commented May 12, 2016 at 12:53

7 Answers 7

I don't have any special knowledge of journalism, but I have a fair amount of experience with academic writing as well as giving advice to my grad students. Here's my take, all at the paper level:

You're right about the possibility of sensationalism. I tell some of my students to imagine someone reading their work twenty years from now. Too much enthusiasm about a well-known result--or possibly an overturned result--will seem odd.

Newspaper and magazine articles are written for a much broader audience than academic papers, and they assume a lot less about the reader's background knowledge. It's possible to explain too much or to overwrite in academic writing.

In some long-form magazine articles, we read a story that gradually unfolds. That's less appropriate in academic writing, when you want to tell readers the conclusion up front, and then explain how you got there. Even if some research solved a mystery, it's conventional to present it with the resolution at the beginning.

• 2 I'm new to Writers.SE too, but this is a great answer, thank you! (Also, from my experience on other sites on the stack exchange network i can say this is a quality answer. :) –  Thomas Shields Commented Apr 13, 2012 at 2:04
• +1 since I also believe this is a good answer. The second paragraph about how you should review your own writing was particularly insightful. –  Alexandre Martins Commented Apr 13, 2012 at 14:32

Well, having been a Social Science major and a Journalism minor who has written several academic papers and worked for a variety of newspapers and magazines here is the difference for me.

In academic writing you generally introduce a topic by presenting a thesis or a hypothesis, then you lay out the premise of the discussion, then you discuss the topic and then review the discussion. In other words: You tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, you tell them, and then you tell 'em what you told them. The 'meat' of the discussion will generally be in the middle or towards the end.

In journalistic writing you write in what's called the inverted pyramid style. The 'meat' of the article will almost always be in the first paragraph, called the lede [or lead. Sometimes called a whatta (as in "what it's all about") or a nut graph, as in ("in a nutshell")]. The lede should be a paragraph that's so dense it could choke a horse. If you read nothing but the lede you will still know the who, what, when and where of the story.

After the lede you follow up with the how and -maybe- the why and other information of secondary and tertiary importance. If you've ever heard the phrase "buried the lede", that's what happens when you lead with interesting but less important information and the stuff of primary importance is 'buried' deep inside the article. This tactic is useful for academic writing but it's antithetical to journalistic writing. One other big difference is that instead of putting a nice summary conclusion at the end that neatly wraps everything up, like an academic paper, your journalistic article will simply stop at the end when you've run out of useful information.

The reason for this top-heavy style difference is twofold: One, readers of newspapers and magazines (this also applies to web) will generally stop reading after a few paragraphs. If you "bury the lede", the reader will stop reading before they get the most important information. Two, Copy editors realize they have limited space, especially in print. So when it comes time to chop your article to fit they aren't going to read the whole damn thing and edit it to make sense - they're just going to lop off as much stuff as they need to off the end assuming you've placed the most important stuff at the top. If the important bit is at the end, there's a good chance it'll just get cut or never even be read.

There are other differences, of course. Journalistic writing should be simpler and more accessible to the general public than academic writing. It doesn't have to be Dr. Seuss but it should be easily read by an educated 10th or 11th grade high school student. You should also keep in mind that your job is merely the inform the audience and present a balanced viewpoint; it is not your job to advocate for one side or the other. That's what the opinion page is for.

• Spot-on. This matches my experience as a student and student journalist. –  Monica Cellio Commented Aug 28, 2014 at 13:52

I teach in a journalism program, so I'm often answering this question from the opposite perspective, helping students make the transition from academic prose to journalistic writing. Here are what I see as the major differences:

Journalistic: Short, simple declarative sentences. Attention to length and rhythm. Active voice.

Academic: Longer sentences with clauses often necessary to get across more complicated ideas.

Journalistic: In news stories, a sentence or two long. Direct quotations get their own paragraphs. One-sentence transitions to change topics.

Academic: First sentence introduces the topic (topic sentence). This is followed by several sentences that explore the topic.

Journalistic: Attribution is included in the same sentence as the direct or indirect quotation (Smith said, she acknowledged), usually at the end of the sentence. Quotations are rarely longer than two sentences.

Academic: Source of information is always included in footnotes, endnotes or works cited page. In-text parenthetical citation or super-script notation. Source may or may not be included in the text itself. Longer quotations indented as a text block.

Journalistic: Several forms depending on the type of story. Hard news is usually written with a summary paragraph at the top and then information in order of decreasing importance (inverted pyramid). Feature and longer explanatory stories might start with a vignette or scene-setter. Text organized by topic or chronologically.

Academic: Five-paragraph essay or an extended version of the essay: Introduction and context, middle organized by topic, acknowledgement of counter-argument, conclusion.

Journalistic: Presentation of facts or explanations for a general audience. Opinions come from people quoted in the story, not the writer. Points of view from different perspectives.

Academic: Writers are making an argument for a particular point of view (hypothesis) and using evidence and logic to prove or disprove it. Counter-arguments acknowledged near the end of paper primarily to be argued against. Hope that's what you were looking for.

Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for but, have you tried to ask your supervisor what are the concrete complaints he has about your style?

Unless your field of research is related to journalism, it is possible that your supervisor actually doesn't know how to structure a journalistic text well or at all.

On the other hand, he knows scientific writing well and had some concrete aspects in mind when making that, hard to understand, metaphor.

Ask your supervisor to be more details on what he thinks you should improve. If you do that, you will surelly get much better feedback than you will ever obtain here.

• 1 +1, this is useful, but like you said - not exactly what I'm looking for. I'll edit the question to clarify, but I'm not asking so I can change my paper; I'm asking a more general question. But thanks though, good point –  Thomas Shields Commented Apr 12, 2012 at 23:55
• 1 I see your goal. And I think I'll tag along and monitor this question as well. You might get interesting answers. :D –  Alexandre Martins Commented Apr 13, 2012 at 1:02

Note that this answer comes 8 years and 4 months after the question was asked. It's probably not useful to the original poster (who likely has a spouse, two kids, a career, and a mortgage to worry about now), but may be of use to others.

At any rate...

The difference between journalistic and academic writing is mainly the difference between rhetorical and analytical modes of persuasion. In brief:

• The rhetorical mode tries to persuade by 'painting a picture' that people can intuitively grasp. It relies on the innate capacity of the reader to sympathetically engage with a narrative, and uses that narrative to lead the reader to the author's conclusion.
• The analytical mode tries to persuade by laying out an assortment of 'facts' and demonstrating that these 'facts' can only be understood within a particular structure of logic and reason. The analytical mode tends to break narrative structures by forcing the reader to confront logical inconsistencies.

Good journalists and good academics will obviously do a bit of both in their writing, but if we think in terms of the ancient Greek triad of logos , pathos , and ethos — appeals to logic, emotions, and moral sense, respectively — academic work learn towards logos , journalism leans towards pathos , and both try to structure an ethos in which their conclusions stand out as meaningful and correct. Neither mode is right or wrong; they are both useful and appropriate in their proper context.

Younger writers tend to write rhetorically; this is a given. They use colloquial speech to give their writing emotional depth and power; they gloss over analytical arguments on the assumption that the reader will intuitively understand the point; they worry more about issues of self-presentation and appearance than about leveraging substantive 'facts' within a structured argument. People in general have a journalistic bent, preferring a good narrative over sound reasoning, so it is common to see senior theses with a distinctly journalistic flavor. No worries. Developing the skill of analysis is an uphill battle for most people (not to diminish the skills involved in journalistic writing), because analysis asks people to give up their normal expectation of sympathetic understanding and write from an uncomfortably cold, depersonalized perspective. But it is a rewarding battle for anyone, even if one is only going to write journalistically.

I know exactly what that means.

I used to get that a lot too.

I am guessing you are writing for a history class, a political theory class, or something like that?

Journalistic writing simply means, your writing style is too lyrical, too much like storytelling, too colorful.

Academic style is much colder, uses far fewer adjectives, employs a lot more data and figures (statistics), and has far fewer (if any) dialogues.

Academic writing is making an argument for a hypothesis (particular point of view) and using evidence and logic to prove or disprove it. Counter-arguments acknowledged near the end of paper primarily to be argued against. Academic writing is intended to be persuasive and usually attempts to convince the readers to agree with a specific point of view which is supported by academic research and analysis. On the other hand a Newspaper is meant to convey presentation of facts or explanations for a general audience. Opinions come from people quoted in the story, not the writer and is generally designed to inform and entertain.

Your Answer

Reminder: Answers generated by artificial intelligence tools are not allowed on Writing Stack Exchange. Learn more

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest.

Required, but never shown

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy .

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged style academic-writing journalism or ask your own question .

• Featured on Meta
• Upcoming sign-up experiments related to tags

Hot Network Questions

• Story about a future gang initiation - but there's a twist
• Photo on a CV for a researcher application in Japan?
• Why is array access not an infix operator?
• Reproducing Ómar Rayo's "Fresh Fog" Painting
• Why are we abbreviating Player's Handbook to PHB?
• Overlap of wave functions in Franck-Condon principle
• What do we mean when we say the CMB has a temperature and how do we measure it?
• What are the approaches of protecting against partially initialized objects?
• Smallest Harmonic number greater than N
• Improving Portfolio Optimization on a Mean-Variance Basis
• How does customs clearance work when you fly into Norway through Oslo, then have your luggage checked through to a regional airport?
• How to explain Hazard Ratio in layperson's terms
• Should laundry equipment be internally braced for long-distance travel?
• Can this flying island survive a 15kt nuke? (and if yes, how much more can it take?)
• Is it possible to retract an acceptance for a full time lecturer position? (Michigan)
• How can show division of fraction with tikz?
• Who was the first philosopher to describe what we now call artificial intelligence?
• Starlink Satellite Orbits
• Is it known that the the sequence 7n+1 would diverge starting with 7?
• Can someone explain the damage distrubution on this aircraft that flew through a hailstorm?
• Why does Mars have a jagged light curve?
• Why are ETFs so bad at tracking Japanese indices?
• Double move chess
• Is Earth's Atmospheric Thickness Related to Cosmic Ray Radiation?

In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

• WRITING SKILLS

Journalistic Writing

Search SkillsYouNeed:

Writing Skills:

• A - Z List of Writing Skills

The Essentials of Writing

• Common Mistakes in Writing
• Introduction to Grammar
• Improving Your Grammar
• Active and Passive Voice
• Punctuation
• Clarity in Writing
• Writing Concisely
• Coherence in Writing
• Gender Neutral Language
• Figurative Language
• When to Use Capital Letters
• Using Plain English
• Writing in UK and US English
• Understanding (and Avoiding) Clichés
• The Importance of Structure
• Know Your Audience
• Know Your Medium
• Formal and Informal Writing Styles
• Note-Taking from Reading
• Note-Taking for Verbal Exchanges
• Creative Writing
• Top Tips for Writing Fiction
• Writer's Voice
• Writing for Children
• Writing for Pleasure
• Writing for the Internet
• Technical Writing
• Academic Writing
• Editing and Proofreading

Writing Specific Documents

• Writing a CV or Résumé
• Writing a Covering Letter
• Writing a Personal Statement
• Writing Reviews
• Using LinkedIn Effectively
• Business Writing
• Study Skills
• Writing Your Dissertation or Thesis

Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and start improving your life in just 5 minutes a day.

You'll get our 5 free 'One Minute Life Skills' and our weekly newsletter.

We'll never share your email address and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Journalistic writing is, as you might expect, the style of writing used by journalists. It is therefore a term for the broad style of writing used by news media outlets to put together stories.

Every news media outlet has its own ‘house’ style, which is usually set out in guidelines. This describes grammar and style points to be used in that publication or website. However, there are some common factors and characteristics to all journalistic writing.

This page describes the five different types of journalistic writing. It also provides some tips for writing in journalistic style to help you develop your skills in this area.

The Purpose of Journalistic Writing

Journalistic writing has a very clear purpose: to attract readers to a website, broadcaster or print media. This allows the owners to make money, usually by selling advertising space.

Newspapers traditionally did not make most of their money by selling newspapers. Instead, their main income was actually from advertising. If you look back at an early copy of the London Times , for example (from the early 1900s), the whole front page was actually advertisements, not news.

The news and stories are only a ‘hook’ to bring in readers and keep advertisers happy.

Journalists therefore want to attract readers to their stories—and then keep them.

They are therefore very good at identifying good stories, but also telling the story in a way that hooks and keeps readers interested.

Types of Journalistic Writing

There are five main types of journalistic writing:

Investigative journalism aims to discover the truth about a topic, person, group or event . It may require detailed and in-depth exploration through interviews, research and analysis. The purpose of investigative journalism is to answer questions.

News journalism reports facts, as they emerge . It aims to provide people with objective information about current events, in straightforward terms.

Feature writing provides a deeper look at events, people or topics , and offer a new perspective. Like investigative journalism, it may seek to uncover new information, but is less about answering questions, and more about simply providing more information.

Columns are the personal opinions of the writer . They are designed to entertain and persuade readers, and sometimes to be controversial and generate discussion.

Reviews describe a subject in a factual way, and then provide a personal opinion on it . They are often about books or television programmes when published in news media.

The importance of objectivity

It should be clear from the list of types of journalistic writing that journalists are not forbidden from expressing their opinions.

However, it is important that any journalist is absolutely clear when they are expressing their opinion, and when they are reporting on facts.

Readers are generally seeking objective writing and reporting when they are reading news or investigative journalism, or features. The place for opinions is columns or reviews.

The Journalistic Writing Process

Journalists tend to follow a clear process in writing any article. This allows them to put together a compelling story, with all the necessary elements.

This process is:

1. Gather all necessary information

The first step is to gather all the information that you need to write the story.

You want to know all the facts, from as many angles as possible. Journalists often spend time ‘on site’ as part of this process, interviewing people to find out what has happened, and how events have affected them.

Ideally, you want to use primary sources: people who were actually there, and witnessed the events. Secondary sources (those who were told by others what happened) are very much second-best in journalism.

2. Verify all your sources

It is crucial to establish the value of your information—that is, whether it is true or not.

A question of individual ‘truth’

It has become common in internet writing to talk about ‘your truth’, or ‘his truth’.

There is a place for this in journalism. It recognises that the same events may be experienced and interpreted in different ways by different people.

However, journalists also need to recognise that there are always some objective facts associated with any story. They must take time to separate these objective facts from opinions or perceptions and interpretations of events.

3. Establish your angle

You then need to establish your story ‘angle’ or focus: the aspect that makes it newsworthy.

This will vary with different types of journalism, and for different news outlets. It may also need some thought to establish why people should care about your story.

4. Write a strong opening paragraph

Your opening paragraph tells readers why they should bother to read on.

It needs to summarise the five Ws of the story: who, what, why, when, and where.

5. Consider the headline

Journalists are not necessarily expected to come up with their own headlines. However, it helps to consider how a piece might be headlined.

Being able to summarise the piece in a few words is a very good way to ensure that you are clear about your story and angle.

6. Use the ‘inverted pyramid’ structure

Journalists use a very clear structure for their stories. They start with the most important information (the opening paragraph, above), then expand on that with more detail. Finally, the last section of the article provides more information for anyone who is interested.

This means that you can therefore glean the main elements of any news story from the first paragraph—and decide if you want to read on.

Why the Inverted Pyramid?

The inverted pyramid structure actually stems from print journalism.

If typesetters could not fit the whole story into the space available, they would simply cut off the last few sentences until the article fitted.

Journalists therefore started to write in a way that ensured that the important information would not be removed during this process!

7. Edit your work carefully

The final step in the journalistic writing process is to edit your work yourself before submitting it.

Newsrooms and media outlets generally employ professional editors to check all copy before submitting it. However, journalists also have a responsibility to check their work over before submission to make sure it makes sense.

Read your work over to check that you have written in plain English , and that your meaning is as clear as possible. This will save the sub-editors and editors from having to waste time contacting you for clarifications.

Journalistic Writing Style

As well as a very clear process, journalists also share a common style.

This is NOT the same as the style guidelines used for certain publications (see box), but describes common features of all journalistic writing.

The features of journalistic writing include:

Short sentences . Short sentences are much easier to read and understand than longer ones. Journalists therefore tend to keep their sentences to a line of print or less.

Active voice . The active voice (‘he did x’, rather than ‘x was done by him’) is action-focused, and shorter. It therefore keeps readers’ interest, and makes stories more direct and personal.

Quotes. Most news stories and journalistic writing will include quotes from individuals. This makes the story much more people-focused—which is more likely to keep readers interested. This is why many press releases try to provide quotes (and there is more about this in our page How to Write a Press Release ).

Style guidelines

Most news media have style guidelines. They may share these with other outlets (for example, by using the Associated Press guidelines), or they may have their own (such as the London Times style guide).

These guidelines explain the ‘house style’. This may include, for example, whether the outlet commonly uses an ‘Oxford comma’ or comma placed after the penultimate item in a list, and describe the use of capitals or italics for certain words or phrases.

It is important to be aware of these style guidelines if you are writing for a particular publication.

Journalistic writing is the style used by news outlets to tell factual stories. It uses some established conventions, many of which are driven by the constraints of printing. However, these also work well in internet writing as they grab and hold readers’ attention very effectively.

Continue to: Writing for the Internet Cliches to Avoid

See also: Creative Writing Technical Writing Coherence in Writing

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Communication and Culture
• Communication and Social Change
• Communication and Technology
• Communication Theory
• Critical/Cultural Studies
• Gender (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies)
• Health and Risk Communication
• Intergroup Communication
• International/Global Communication
• Interpersonal Communication
• Journalism Studies
• Language and Social Interaction
• Mass Communication
• Media and Communication Policy
• Organizational Communication
• Political Communication
• Rhetorical Theory
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Journalistic writing and style.

• Maarit Jaakkola Maarit Jaakkola Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Gothenburg
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.884
• Published online: 30 July 2018

The core of the journalistic style is the newswriting style. Writing news leans upon the objectivity paradigm that has triggered wide academic debate about the biases in defining journalism. The majority of the scholarship regarding the journalistic style and writing gathers around newspapers and news; however, many traditions of writing transgress the traditional newswriting tradition and are supported by literary and cultural production, and the boundaries are becoming increasingly porous. The history of journalistic styles is closely connected to different genres: genres of journalism, such as news journalism and literary journalism, and textual genres, such as feature, column, and essay. Furthermore, style is a contextual term that emerges as a result of a variety of different choices, can be examined at different levels ranging from words to structures of production, and has to be studied in connection with other factors influencing the communication process such as medium, content, form, genre, discourses, and audience. It may thus be hard to separate the way of knowing from the way of presenting knowledge, “the way of using language” as style typically is defined. Indeed, journalism research is characterized by very diverse conceptualizations and operationalizations of style with regard to journalism. Relevant research is typically located in the intersection of language and journalism, literature and journalism, and the socially constructed reality and journalism, drawing on the different subareas of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, sociology, and interdisciplinary approaches. During the history of journalism studies, the scholarly inquiry has made struggles for symbolic power and alternative ways of knowing and presenting visible. The notions of the journalistic style in newspapers, magazines, and online have become more diverse.

• written texts
• journalistic writing
• language use
• writing style
• objectivity
• subjectivity
• journalism studies

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Communication. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 12 June 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [195.158.225.244]
• 195.158.225.244

Character limit 500 /500

• Writing Style
• How to write …
• Analysis of Speech
• Storytelling
• Career Development

What Is Journalistic Writing: Purpose, Features, Types, and 10 News Values

• by Anastasiya Yakubovska
• 26.04.2022 02.05.2024

Further in the article, you will learn about what journalistic writing is, its main purpose, what are the features and characteristics of journalistic style, get acquainted with three types of journalism, and at the end of the article, you will find information about how the media select news.

Not so long ago, people could get news only from local newspapers, radio, and television. Nowdays we have access to any information in any format 24/7 (thank you, Internet!).

The ways of obtaining information have changed, but the principles and features of journalism have remained the same.

Table of Contents

What is journalistic writing, and its main purpose.

• Features of Journalistic Writing 

How to Write a Journalistic Text: 3 Key Elements

Information genre and its types, analytical genre.

• Artistic-journalistic Types of Journalistic Writing 
• 10 News Values 

Journalistic writing is a style of writing that is used by the media to transmit news messages to a mass addressee (newspapers, television, radio, Internet).

Journalistic writing has two main purposes, which to some extent contradict each other:

• Informing . The main aim of journalistic writing is to inform the public about the event that has occurred or will occur in the future, while the journalist must be as objective as possible.
• Impact on the audience . In some cases, news reports may be overly emotional with a pronounced position of the author and his personal opinion. Such messages have a social assessment and appeal, influence the people and form public opinion.

Features of Journalistic Writing

Journalistic writing has some specific features by which it is easy to identify:

• Informative heading. The news headlines are quite long. From the title, it is clear what will be discussed in the news article. 
• The first sentence (paragraph or lead) summarizes the essence of the news. 
• The inverted pyramid principle . The priority, value, and usefulness of information decrease from the beginning of the text to its end.
• Sentences and paragraphs are mostly short.
• Lots of specifics and details.
• Readability, simplicity, competent presentation of information.
• Emotionality and evaluation.
• Frequent use of socio-political vocabulary (names of political parties, departments, economic and legal terms, etc.). 
• Focus on a mass audience.
• Rhetorical questions, exclamations, and repetitions.
• In addition to the main colloquial (informal) style used in journalism, there are slang and jargon words.
• post “What Is Scientific Writing Style: Characteristics, Types, and Examples”.
• “What Is Business Writing Style: Characteristics, Types, and Examples”.

There are three key components on which any journalistic text is built:

• Lead (or lede). This is the first sentence or main and opening paragraph of the news article. The lead is the “header” of the article, which outlines the main idea of the text. Often the lead is highlighted in a different font or color, usually, its length is from 3 to 5 lines of text.

Lead cannot be ignored. It can be sensational or dramatic, it can reveal the details of an event or briefly describe the news, it can amuse the reader or challenge him.

A news article lead looks like this:

“ Rescue operations are continuing in South Africa in an effort to save the lives of dozens of people who are missing following the floods in KwaZulu-Natal province. With more rain on its way, emergency teams face further peril as they search for survivors. “   bbc.com

2. Citation . 90% of all journalistic investigations are based on interviews or other primary sources. Therefore, it is not surprising that quotes have a special place in news reports.

Read also post “How to Write a Persuasive Article or Essay: Examples of Persuasive Argument”.

3. Brevity and readability. Sentences and paragraphs are short and simple. It does not mean that you will not find long compound sentences in the text. But in most cases – “brevity is the soul of wit.”

In addition, it is important not to overdo with terms. Still, the news articles should be understandable to the mass audience: if you used the term “legal nihilism”, be kind, and explain what it means (p.s.: legal nihilism is the denial of laws and rules/norms of behavior ). 

Journalism Genres and Types of Journalistic Writing

There are three genres of journalistic writing:

• Informational : reportage, interview, information note, informational report. The main function is to communicate information: what, where, when, and under what circumstances it happened or will happen.
• Analytical : conversation, review , article, survey, correspondence. The primary function is to influence the public. There are the author’s reasoning, argumentation, analysis of the event, personal conclusions, and assessment of what is happening.
• Artistic-journalistic : essay , feuilleton, pamphlet, profile essay. These genres used to get a figurative, emotional idea of an event or fact.

Let’s take a closer look at each genre.

Note as a Type of Journalistic Writing

A note is a short message about a new event or fact. The main features are the reliability of the fact, novelty, and brevity.

“The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were accompanied by two of their children as they joined other royals for the Easter Sunday service at Windsor Castle. Prince George was dressed in a dark blue suit like his father while Princess Charlotte’s dress matched her mother Catherine’s light blue outfit . Several of their second cousins, such as Mia Tindall and Savannah and Isla Phillips, also attended. The Queen was not at the service – one of the staples of the family’s year. The 95-year-old monarch, who has been suffering mobility issues recently. was also absent from the traditional Maundy Service last Thursday where special coins were given to 96 men and 96 women .”   bbc.com

Read also “How to Write a News Story”.

Reportage is a message from the scene. Features: efficiency, objective coverage of events, the reporter is an eyewitness or participant in what is happening.

Example: television report (live broadcast from the scene), report in the print media after collecting and processing information.

An interview is the receipt of information during a conversation between an interviewer (journalist) and an interviewee. 

Examples: informational interviews to collect up-to-date data on an air crash that has occurred (for example, an interview with eyewitnesses); interview investigation; personal interview or interview-portrait.

Informational Report

A report is a chronologically sequential, detailed report of an event.

Example: a report on hostilities, a report on the results of a meeting, a conference, a government or court session.

Conversation or Dialogue

A conversation (dialogue) is a type of interview when a journalist acts not just as an intermediary between the hero and the viewer, but communicates with the interlocutor on an equal footing thanks to his achievements, experience, and professionalism.

Example: TV show with artists. 

A review is a critical judgment or discussion that contains an assessment and a brief analysis of a literary work, scientific publication, analysis of a work of art, journalism, etc. 

Examples: book review , play review, movie review , TV show review, game review.

An article is a genre of journalism that expresses the author’s reasoned point of view on social processes, on various current events or phenomena.

After reading an analytical article, the reader receives the information he needs and then independently reflects on the issues of interest to him.

The subject of the article is not the event itself, processes, or phenomena, but the consequences they cause.

Examples: an article on the political development of the country, a practical and analytical article on the rise in food prices, a polemical article (dispute) on teaching the basics of Orthodox culture.

Analytical Correspondence

Analytical correspondence is a message that gives information about an event or phenomenon (usually this is one significant fact).

Analytical correspondence may include fragments of a “live” report or a retelling of what is happening. But necessarily in such a message, there is a clarification of the causes of the event or phenomenon, the determination of its value and significance for society, and the prediction of its further development.

The primary source of this genre of journalistic writing is always the author of the publication (correspondent).

Artistic-journalistic Types of Journalistic Writing

Essay : a journalist not only describes a problem, an event, or a portrait of a person, based on factual data but also uses artistic methods of expressiveness. 

Examples: a portrait essay about the life of a famous person; historical essays , description of incidents, meetings with people during the author’s travel (essay by A. S. Pushkin “Journey to Arzrum”, 1829).

Feuilleton is a short note, essay, or article of a satirical nature, the main task of which is to ridicule “evil”.

Examples: satirical writers such as M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, I.A. Ilf, and E.P. Petrov.

A pamphlet is a satirical work or article, the purpose of which is to ridicule certain human vices, to denounce and humiliate a hero who appears to the author as a carrier of a dangerous social evil.

In a pamphlet, the author uses grotesque, hyperbole, irony, and sarcasm.

Examples: “Lettres provinciales” by the French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal, “The Grumbled Hive” by the English writer Bernard Mandeville, pamphleteers D.I. Pisarev with the pamphlet “Bees”, A.M. Gorky “The City of the Yellow Devil”, L.M. Leonov “The Shadow of Barbarossa”.

10 News Values

First of all, journalistic writing is associated with the media. A special place in the mass media is occupied by news articles : they are in demand and attract more readers.

Therefore, I propose to pay attention to one very interesting point: how is a news article written, and by what criteria are news “selected”?

So, 10 news values are:

• Relevance . The news must meet the needs and interests of the audience.
• Timeliness . Event information must be up to date and appear on time. No one will read the election results two weeks after the election.
• Clarity and unambiguity. Simple, understandable news is more accessible to the public, read more often, and is more interesting. 
• Predictability . Significant events usually have specific dates (for example, election day, the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, the football championship). Therefore, with the approach of such an event, public interest increases, and the news becomes more valuable.
• Unpredictability . On the other hand, unpredictable events and phenomena (natural disasters or crimes) also arouse public interest.
• Importance and scale of the event. War, elections, protests, sports games, and other important events require long and detailed press coverage.
• Composition . Sometimes, to dilute, for example, the negativity of the information flow, the editor selects news reports of the opposite nature: funny cases, love, romance, salvation, animals, adventure, risk, etc.
• Celebrities . News with the participation of politicians, artists, and sportsmen, due to their status and recognition, is more often published in the media and arouses increased interest.
• Leading countries in the world economy and politics. A strike, a natural disaster, or a plane crash in a developed country will immediately hit the media. But about the lack of drinking water in Ethiopia, you can write later.
• Negativity . The “bad” news is more popular.

P. S.: Did you like this post? Share it with your friends, thank you!

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

Average rating 5 / 5. Vote count: 7

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

Journalistic Style

Professional writing , how-to , college writing.

Writing in a journalistic style is not a skill all college students get to learn; however, it is definitely useful regardless of the career field one chooses. We’re so used to writing paragraph after paragraph, citing sources, formatting bibliographies, and making sure we meet the page or word count requirement. Journalism is different. The basic rules of English still must be followed, and there is a certain format and writing style used. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you understand the difference between writing an essay and an article:

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT use superfluous words, phrases or information.

Journalists need to understand that not every member of their audience has the same level of education, so simple language should be used. For example, you may not see the word “superfluous” in an article, but you may see “excessive” or “unnecessary.”

In addition, readers don’t always have the time to sit down and read every minute detail about an event, so a journalist must write the most important facts (preferably at the beginning of the story), keeping the story short and sweet, but long enough that the reader can piece together what happened and make sense of it.

Paragraphs in articles are generally no longer than a couple of sentences, although in more in-depth pieces, they can be around four or five sentences long.

Image from Creative Commons search Website: https://pixabay.com/p-154444/?no_redirect

Here are a few phrases that are redundant or can be shortened in articles, and their replacement words are in parentheses ( from Flyod Baskette and Jack Sissors ) :

• A good part (much)
• A little less than (almost)
• Accidentally stumbled (stumbled)
• Disclosed for the first time (disclosed)
• Jewish Rabbi (Rabbi)
• Due to the fact that (because)
• Easter Sunday (Easter)
• Entered a bid of (bid)
• Grand total (total)
• In the immediate vicinity (near)

Style and Formatting

The Associated Press has specific style notes that journalists follow. Here are a few:

• DO NOT start a sentence with a number, unless it is a year (e.g., 1920 was a great year for dancing).
• Use Roman numerals to describe wars and important people, such as World War II, Pope Benedict XVI, Queen Elizabeth II, etc.
• When describing decades or centuries, do not use an apostrophe between the year and the ‘s’ at the end (e.g., 1990s, the ‘60s, etc.)
• Names – The first time you mention a person in a story, ALWAYS use his or her first and last name. Any time you refer to him or her afterwards, use just the last name. Avoid using titles like Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms. unless they are in a quotation.
• Cities – There are a list of 30 cities that do not require state names after them, two of which are Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The other 28 are available here . 

Gatlung and Ruge give some insight as to how the gatekeepers of news (those who pick which stories need to be written) choose stories. First, the story must be relevant. If the Orioles beat the Yankees in the ALCS, sports fans would want to hear about that immediately, not two days after it happened. Though it would still be news two days later, it has more relevance the sooner it is printed (which ties in with timeliness).

Additionally, gatekeepers sometimes choose softer (or what I call “feel good”) stories to balance out the harder, investigative pieces. Unfortunately, a lot of our news is negative, with shootings happening almost daily across the nation, robberies, car accidents, etc., and that is what keeps a reader’s attention. Journalists need to be aware of the nature of the stories they write so they can keep the public more informed.

Final thoughts: use complete sentences, avoid comma splices , and always, always, ALWAYS report the facts as accurately as possible. Before you know it, writing articles will be as easy as writing a 5-page research paper.

-Kelsey , peer tutor

29 September, 2015 by McDaniel College Writing Center

• Follow us on Facebook
• Follow us on Twitter
• Criminal Justice
• Environment
• Politics & Government
• Race & Gender

Expert Commentary

The journalistic method: Five principles for blending analysis and narrative

Columbia Journalism School's Nicholas Lemann explains a series of rules that can help journalists successfully integrate research and reporting.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by The Journalist's Resource, The Journalist's Resource April 8, 2016

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/media/journalistic-method-tip-sheet-blending-analysis-narrative/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

The intersection of knowledge and narrative, of informed journalism, is the heart of what the Journalist’s Resource project continues to explore. In the short essay below, Nicholas Lemann, a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker , articulates a method for journalism that integrates knowledge while preserving the art of storytelling. We reprint it here with his permission:

A central problem in the practice of journalism is that most of the time, we are trying to engage in narrative and analysis at the same time. They don’t naturally go together. Journalists more often unwittingly let the narrative distort the analysis than vice versa. What follows is an attempt at a journalistic version of the scientific method, aimed at protecting us from writing stories that are factually accurate and narratively compelling, but still fail to capture the truth of a situation.

• Awareness. On any complicated subject, beware, when you set out, of overly simple conceptions of what ‘the story’ is. Often these involve your having unwittingly accepted somebody else’s frame of reference, or having been primed to see the story in a certain way, or having mistaken correlation for causation, or having succumbed to some other form of embedded misperception. As a first step, you should always stop and ask yourself what you have bought into before you have begun.
• Forming a hypothesis. It’s healthier to admit to yourself that you have one than to go into a story with the idea that you have no presuppositions at all – that would be impossible. You should state a working hypothesis (to yourself, anyway), and then ask yourself what would prove the hypothesis false and what would be an alternate hypothesis to explain whatever it is you are investigating. As you report, you should try not just to prove but also to disprove your working hypothesis, and you should engage in a continuing process of revision of the hypothesis, if necessary. If you don’t design your reporting in such a way that if your hypothesis is flawed, you will find that out before you finish the story, then you are leaving yourself open to getting the story seriously wrong.
• Mapping the discourse. On any important issue, there is likely to be a long-running debate with a set of established compass points. Therefore the idea that you can find ‘an expert’ who can explain the issue quickly over the phone is unrealistic, and so, probably, is the idea that you can find two experts, one on each side, who between them can do justice to the subject. Instead, you should familiarize yourself with the expert discourse on the subject. You don’t need to read everything, but you need to know what the major schools of thought are, and where the debate stands at present, and you should be able to read the primary material for yourself as a way of enriching what other people tell you about it.
• Evaluating the data. Never accept a conclusion from an expert at face value. Instead, you should follow the steps that led to the conclusion, and you should make some judgment as to whether the methodology and presentation are sound. You should also find out whether somebody else has drawn a different conclusion about the same subject.
• Transparency. Journalism is not scholarship and does not generally use bibliographies or footnotes, but you should use attribution in your work in such a way that readers and colleagues can see, to the greatest extent possible, where your information came from and how you have reached your conclusions. Therefore, the use of anonymous sources should be kept to a minimum – you should always try to avoid saying something important with only the testimony of an unnamed person as proof. Even your journalistic competitors should be able to tell, from your work, how to pursue your story further.

Nicholas Lemann is the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 

Keywords: reporting, style, writing

About The Author

The Journalist's Resource

Is MasterClass right for me?

Take this quiz to find out.

Get up to 50% off this Father's Day.

Offer Ends Soon

How to Write Like a Journalist: 8 Tips

Written by MasterClass

Last updated: Sep 8, 2021 • 4 min read

To effectively tell a story, learn to write like a journalist. The same techniques writers use for Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism in the New York Times can be applied to any type of writing, like a novel, academic writing, or blogging. Thinking like a journalist allows a writer to create a compelling story that hooks the reader from the first sentence.

• Games & Quizzes
• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

The profession

Present-day journalism.

• What was James Joyce’s family like?
• Why is Jonathan Swift an important writer?
• What was Jonathan Swift’s family like when he was growing up?
• What is Jonathan Swift best known for?
• How did Karl Marx die?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• American Press Institute - Journalism Essentials
• Saskatchewan Polytechnic Pressbooks - Disinformation: Dealing with the Disaster - Journalism and Editing
• Social Sciences LibreTexts - Types of Journalism
• journalism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Recent News

journalism , the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and related commentary and feature materials through such print and electronic media as newspapers , magazines , books , blogs , webcasts, podcasts, social networking and social media sites, and e-mail as well as through radio , motion pictures , and television . The word journalism was originally applied to the reportage of current events in printed form, specifically newspapers, but with the advent of radio, television, and the Internet in the 20th century the use of the term broadened to include all printed and electronic communication dealing with current affairs.

The earliest known journalistic product was a news sheet circulated in ancient Rome: the Acta Diurna , said to date from before 59 bce . The Acta Diurna recorded important daily events such as public speeches. It was published daily and hung in prominent places. In China during the Tang dynasty , a court circular called a bao , or “report,” was issued to government officials. This gazette appeared in various forms and under various names more or less continually to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The first regularly published newspapers appeared in German cities and in Antwerp about 1609. The first English newspaper, the Weekly Newes , was published in 1622. One of the first daily newspapers, The Daily Courant , appeared in 1702.

At first hindered by government-imposed censorship , taxes, and other restrictions, newspapers in the 18th century came to enjoy the reportorial freedom and indispensable function that they have retained to the present day. The growing demand for newspapers owing to the spread of literacy and the introduction of steam- and then electric-driven presses caused the daily circulation of newspapers to rise from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands and eventually to the millions.

Magazines , which had started in the 17th century as learned journals, began to feature opinion-forming articles on current affairs, such as those in the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12). Appearing in the 1830s were cheap mass-circulation magazines aimed at a wider and less well-educated public, as well as illustrated and women’s magazines. The cost of large-scale news gathering led to the formation of news agencies , organizations that sold their international journalistic reporting to many different individual newspapers and magazines. The invention of the telegraph and then radio and television brought about a great increase in the speed and timeliness of journalistic activity and, at the same time, provided massive new outlets and audiences for their electronically distributed products. In the late 20th century, satellites and later the Internet were used for the long-distance transmission of journalistic information.

Journalism in the 20th century was marked by a growing sense of professionalism . There were four important factors in this trend: (1) the increasing organization of working journalists, (2) specialized education for journalism, (3) a growing literature dealing with the history , problems, and techniques of mass communication , and (4) an increasing sense of social responsibility on the part of journalists.

An organization of journalists began as early as 1883, with the foundation of England’s chartered Institute of Journalists. Like the American Newspaper Guild, organized in 1933, and the Fédération Nationale de la Presse Française, the institute functioned as both a trade union and a professional organization.

Before the latter part of the 19th century, most journalists learned their craft as apprentices, beginning as copyboys or cub reporters. The first university course in journalism was given at the University of Missouri (Columbia) in 1879–84. In 1912 Columbia University in New York City established the first graduate program in journalism, endowed by a grant from the New York City editor and publisher Joseph Pulitzer . It was recognized that the growing complexity of news reporting and newspaper operation required a great deal of specialized training. Editors also found that in-depth reporting of special types of news, such as political affairs, business, economics , and science , often demanded reporters with education in these areas. The advent of motion pictures, radio, and television as news media called for an ever-increasing battery of new skills and techniques in gathering and presenting the news. By the 1950s, courses in journalism or communications were commonly offered in colleges.

The literature of the subject—which in 1900 was limited to two textbooks, a few collections of lectures and essays, and a small number of histories and biographies—became copious and varied by the late 20th century. It ranged from histories of journalism to texts for reporters and photographers and books of conviction and debate by journalists on journalistic capabilities, methods, and ethics .

Concern for social responsibility in journalism was largely a product of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The earliest newspapers and journals were generally violently partisan in politics and considered that the fulfillment of their social responsibility lay in proselytizing their own party’s position and denouncing that of the opposition. As the reading public grew, however, the newspapers grew in size and wealth and became increasingly independent. Newspapers began to mount their own popular and sensational “crusades” in order to increase their circulation. The culmination of this trend was the competition between two New York City papers, the World and the Journal , in the 1890s ( see yellow journalism ).

The sense of social responsibility made notable growth as a result of specialized education and widespread discussion of press responsibilities in books and periodicals and at the meetings of the associations. Such reports as that of the Royal Commission on the Press (1949) in Great Britain and the less extensive A Free and Responsible Press (1947) by an unofficial Commission on the Freedom of the Press in the United States did much to stimulate self-examination on the part of practicing journalists.

By the late 20th century, studies showed that journalists as a group were generally idealistic about their role in bringing the facts to the public in an impartial manner. Various societies of journalists issued statements of ethics, of which that of the American Society of Newspaper Editors is perhaps best known.

Although the core of journalism has always been the news, the latter word has acquired so many secondary meanings that the term “ hard news ” gained currency to distinguish items of definite news value from others of marginal significance. This was largely a consequence of the advent of radio and television reporting, which brought news bulletins to the public with a speed that the press could not hope to match. To hold their audience, newspapers provided increasing quantities of interpretive material—articles on the background of the news, personality sketches, and columns of timely comment by writers skilled in presenting opinion in readable form. By the mid-1960s most newspapers, particularly evening and Sunday editions, were relying heavily on magazine techniques, except for their content of “hard news,” where the traditional rule of objectivity still applied. Newsmagazines in much of their reporting were blending news with editorial comment.

Journalism in book form has a short but vivid history. The proliferation of paperback books during the decades after World War II gave impetus to the journalistic book, exemplified by works reporting and analyzing election campaigns, political scandals, and world affairs in general, and the “new journalism” of such authors as Truman Capote , Tom Wolfe , and Norman Mailer .

The 20th century saw a renewal of the strictures and limitations imposed upon the press by governments. In countries with communist governments, the press was owned by the state, and journalists and editors were government employees. Under such a system, the prime function of the press to report the news was combined with the duty to uphold and support the national ideology and the declared goals of the state. This led to a situation in which the positive achievements of communist states were stressed by the media, while their failings were underreported or ignored. This rigorous censorship pervaded journalism in communist countries.

In noncommunist developing countries , the press enjoyed varying degrees of freedom, ranging from the discreet and occasional use of self-censorship on matters embarrassing to the home government to a strict and omnipresent censorship akin to that of communist countries. The press enjoyed the maximum amount of freedom in most English-speaking countries and in the countries of western Europe.

Whereas traditional journalism originated during a time when information was scarce and thus highly in demand, 21st-century journalism faced an information-saturated market in which news had been, to some degree , devalued by its overabundance. Advances such as satellite and digital technology and the Internet made information more plentiful and accessible and thereby stiffened journalistic competition. To meet increasing consumer demand for up-to-the-minute and highly detailed reporting, media outlets developed alternative channels of dissemination, such as online distribution, electronic mailings, and direct interaction with the public via forums, blogs, user-generated content, and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter .

In the second decade of the 21st century, social media platforms in particular facilitated the spread of politically oriented “fake news,” a kind of disinformation produced by for-profit Web sites posing as legitimate news organizations and designed to attract (and mislead) certain readers by exploiting entrenched partisan biases. During the campaign for the U.S. presidential election of 2016 and after his election as president in that year, Donald J. Trump regularly used the term “fake news” to disparage news reports, including by established and reputable media organizations, that contained negative information about him.

Journalism Online

Real Information For Real People

What is Literary Journalism: a Guide with Examples

Literary journalism is a genre created with the help of a reporter’s inner voice and employing a writing style based on literary techniques. The journalists working in the genre of literary journalism must be able to use the whole literary arsenal: epithets, impersonations, comparisons, allegories, etc. Thus, literary journalism is similar to fiction. At the same time, it remains journalism , which is the opposite of fiction as it tells a true story. The journalist’s task here is not only to inform us about specific events but also to affect our feelings (mainly aesthetic ones) and explore the details that ordinary journalism overlooks.

Characteristics of literary journalism

Modern journalism is constantly changing, but not all changes are good for it (take fake news proliferating thanks to social media , for instance). Contemporary literary journalism differs from its historic predecessor in the following:

• Literary journalism almost completely lost its unity with literature
• Journalists have stopped relying on the literary features of the language and style
• There are fewer and fewer articles in the genre of literary journalism in modern editions
• Contemporary media has lost the need in literary journalism
• The habits of media consumers today are not sophisticated enough for a revival of literary journalism

The most prominent works of literary journalism

With all this, it’s no surprise that we need to go back in time to find worthy examples of literary journalism. Fortunately, it wasn’t until the 1970-s that literary journalism came to an end, so here are 4 great works of the genre that are worth every minute of your attention.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Mark Twain studied journalism from the age of 12 and until the end of his life. It brought him his first glory and a pseudonym and made him a writer. In 1867, Twain (as a correspondent of the newspaper Daily Alta California , San Francisco) went on a sea voyage to Europe, the Middle East, and Egypt. His reports and travel records turned into the book The Innocents Abroad , which made him famous all over the world.

In some sense, American journalism came out of letters that served as an important source of information about life in the colonies. The newspaper has long been characterized by an epistolary subjectivity, and Twain’s book recalls the times when no one thought that neutrality would one day become one of the hallmarks of the “right” journalism.

Of course, Twain’s travel around the Old World was a journey not only through geography but also through the history that Twain resolutely refused to worship. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes not too much, but the more valuable are the lyrical and sublime notes that sound when Twain-the-narrator is truly captivated by something.

John Hersey, Hiroshima (1946)

John Hersey was a war correspondent and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his debut story A Bell for Adano . As a reporter of The New Yorker , he was one of the first journalists from the USA who came to Hiroshima to describe the consequences of the atomic bombing.

Starting with where two doctors, two priests, a seamstress, and a plant employee were and what they were doing at exactly 08:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Hersey describes the year they lived after that. Hersey’s uniform and detached tone seems to be the only appropriate medium in relation to what one would call indescribable and inexpressible. Without allowing himself sentimentality, admiring horrors, or obvious partiality, he doesn’t miss any of the details that add up to a horrible and magnificent picture.

Hiroshima became a sensation due to the formidable brevity of the author’s prose, which tried to give the reader the most explicit (and the most complete) idea of what happened for the first time in mankind’s history

Truman Capote, “In Cold Blood” (1965)

Truman Capote turned to journalism as a young writer looking for a new form of self-expression. He read an article about the murder of the family of a farmer Herbert Clutter in Holcomb City (Kansas) in the newspaper and went there to collect the material. His original idea was to write about how a brutal murder influenced the life of the quiet backwoods. The killers were caught, and Capote decided to use their confessions in his book. He finished it only after the killers were hanged. This way, the six-year story got the finale.

In Cold Blood was published in “The New Yorker” in 1965. Next year it was released as a book that became the benchmark of true crime and a super bestseller. “In Cold Blood” includes:

• A stylistic brilliance.
• Inexorable footsteps of doom destroying both innocent and guilty.
• The horror hidden in a person and waiting for a chance to break out.

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)

Tomas Wolfe is one of the key figures of literary journalism. Mainly due to his creative and, so to speak, production efforts, “the new journalism” became an essential part of American culture and drew close attention (both critical and academic).

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test became one of the hallmarks of this type of journalism with its focus on aesthetic expressiveness (along with documentary authenticity). This is a story about the writer Ken Kesey and his friends and associates’ community, “Merry Pranksters”, who spread the idea of the benefits of expanding consciousness.

Wolfe decided to plunge into the “subjective reality” of the characters and their adventures. To convey them to the reader, he had to “squeeze” the English language: Wolfe changes prose to poetry , dives into the stream of consciousness, and mocks the traditional punctuation. In general, he does just about everything to make a crazy carnival come to life on the pages of his book (without actually participating in it). Compare that with gonzo journalism by Hunter S. Thompson , the author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which draws upon some similar themes.

The book’s main part is devoted to the journey of the “pranksters” on a psychedelic propaganda bus and the “acid tests” themselves, which were actually parties where a lot of people took LSD. Wolfe had to use different sources of information to reconstruct these events, and it’s hard to believe that he didn’t experience any of them himself. Yet, no matter how bright his book shines and how much freedom it shows, Wolfe makes it clear that he’s talking about a doomed project and an ending era.

You might also like

WHEN MOLD INVADES

What Can You Do With A Journalism Degree?

How are Creativity and Innovation Related?

What Is Literary Journalism?

Carl T. Gossett Jr / Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Literary journalism is a form of nonfiction that combines factual reporting with narrative techniques and stylistic strategies traditionally associated with fiction. This form of writing can also be called  narrative journalism or new journalism . The term literary journalism is sometimes used interchangeably with creative nonfiction ; more often, however, it is regarded as one type of creative nonfiction.

In his ground-breaking anthology The Literary Journalists , Norman Sims observed that literary journalism "demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces to show that an author is at work."

Highly regarded literary journalists in the U.S. today include John McPhee , Jane Kramer, Mark Singer, and Richard Rhodes. Some notable literary journalists of the past include Stephen Crane, Henry Mayhew , Jack London , George Orwell , and Tom Wolfe.

Characteristics of Literary Journalism

There is not exactly a concrete formula that writers use to craft literary journalism, as there is for other genres, but according to Sims, a few somewhat flexible rules and common features define literary journalism. "Among the shared characteristics of literary journalism are immersion reporting, complicated structures, character development, symbolism , voice , a focus on ordinary people ... and accuracy.

"Literary journalists recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered. A list of characteristics can be an easier way to define literary journalism than a formal definition or a set of rules. Well, there are some rules, but Mark Kramer used the term 'breakable rules' in an anthology we edited. Among those rules, Kramer included:

• Literary journalists immerse themselves in subjects' worlds...
• Literary journalists work out implicit covenants about accuracy and candor...
• Literary journalists write mostly about routine events.
• Literary journalists develop meaning by building upon the readers' sequential reactions.

... Journalism ties itself to the actual, the confirmed, that which is not simply imagined. ... Literary journalists have adhered to the rules of accuracy—or mostly so—precisely because their work cannot be labeled as journalism if details and characters are imaginary." 

Why Literary Journalism Is Not Fiction or Journalism

The term "literary journalism" suggests ties to fiction and journalism, but according to Jan Whitt, literary journalism does not fit neatly into any other category of writing. "Literary journalism is not fiction—the people are real and the events occurred—nor is it journalism in a traditional sense.

"There is interpretation, a personal point of view, and (often) experimentation with structure and chronology. Another essential element of literary journalism is its focus. Rather than emphasizing institutions, literary journalism explores the lives of those who are affected by those institutions."

The Role of the Reader

Because creative nonfiction is so nuanced, the burden of interpreting literary journalism falls on readers. John McPhee, quoted by Sims in "The Art of Literary Journalism," elaborates: "Through dialogue , words, the presentation of the scene, you can turn over the material to the reader. The reader is ninety-some percent of what's creative in creative writing. A writer simply gets things started."

Literary Journalism and the Truth

Literary journalists face a complicated challenge. They must deliver facts and comment on current events in ways that speak to much larger big picture truths about culture, politics, and other major facets of life; literary journalists are, if anything, more tied to authenticity than other journalists. Literary journalism exists for a reason: to start conversations.

Literary Journalism as Nonfiction Prose

Rose Wilder talks about literary journalism as nonfiction prose—informational writing that flows and develops organically like a story—and the strategies that effective writers of this genre employ in The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary journalist. "As defined by Thomas B. Connery, literary journalism is 'nonfiction printed prose whose verifiable content is shaped and transformed into a story or sketch by use of narrative and rhetorical  techniques generally associated with fiction.'

"Through these stories and sketches, authors 'make a statement, or provide an interpretation, about the people and culture depicted.' Norman Sims adds to this definition by suggesting the genre  itself allows readers to 'behold others' lives, often set within far clearer contexts than we can bring to our own.'

"He goes on to suggest, 'There is something intrinsically political—and strongly democratic—about literary journalism—something pluralistic, pro-individual, anti-cant, and anti-elite.' Further, as John E. Hartsock points out, the bulk of work that has been considered literary journalism is composed 'largely by professional journalists or those writers whose industrial means of production is to be found in the newspaper and magazine press, thus making them at least for the interim de facto journalists.'"

She concludes, "Common to many definitions of literary journalism is that the work itself should contain some kind of higher truth; the stories themselves may be said to be emblematic of a larger truth."

Background of Literary Journalism

This distinct version of journalism owes its beginnings to the likes of Benjamin Franklin, William Hazlitt, Joseph Pulitzer, and others. "[Benjamin] Franklin's Silence Dogood essays marked his entrance into literary journalism," begins Carla Mulford. "Silence, the persona Franklin adopted, speaks to the form that literary journalism should take—that it should be situated in the ordinary world—even though her background was not typically found in newspaper writing." 

Literary journalism as it is now was decades in the making, and it is very much intertwined with the New Journalism movement of the late 20th century. Arthur Krystal speaks to the critical role that essayist William Hazlitt played in refining the genre: "A hundred and fifty years before the New Journalists of the 1960s rubbed our noses in their egos, [William] Hazlitt put himself into his work with a candor that would have been unthinkable a few generations earlier."

Robert Boynton clarifies the relationship between literary journalism and new journalism, two terms that were once separate but are now often used interchangeably. "The phrase 'New Journalism' first appeared in an American context in the 1880s when it was used to describe the blend of sensationalism and crusading journalism—muckraking on behalf of immigrants and the poor—one found in the New York World and other papers... Although it was historically unrelated to [Joseph] Pulitzer's New Journalism, the genre of writing that Lincoln Steffens called 'literary journalism' shared many of its goals."

Boynton goes on to compare literary journalism with editorial policy. "As the city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in the 1890s, Steffens made literary journalism—artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses—into editorial policy, insisting that the basic goals of the artist and the journalist (subjectivity, honesty, empathy) were the same."

• Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
• Krystal, Arthur. "Slang-Whanger." The New Yorker, 11 May 2009.
• Lane, Rose Wilder.  The Rediscovered Writings of Rose Wilder Lane, Literary Journalist . Edited by Amy Mattson Lauters, University of Missouri Press, 2007.
• Mulford, Carla. “Benjamin Franklin and Transatlantic Literary Journalism.”  Transatlantic Literary Studies, 1660-1830 , edited by Eve Tavor Bannet and Susan Manning, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 75–90.
• Sims, Norman. True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism . 1st ed., Northwestern University Press, 2008.
• Sims, Norman. “The Art of Literary Journalism.”  Literary Journalism , edited by Norman Sims and Mark Kramer, Ballantine Books, 1995.
• Sims, Norman. The Literary Journalists . Ballantine Books, 1984.
• Whitt, Jan. Women in American Journalism: A New History . University of Illinois Press, 2008.
• An Introduction to Literary Nonfiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• John McPhee: His Life and Work
• Defining Nonfiction Writing
• Genres in Literature
• literary present (verbs)
• Third-Person Point of View
• Tips on Great Writing: Setting the Scene
• What Is a Synopsis and How Do You Write One?
• A Guide to All Types of Narration, With Examples
• The Essay: History and Definition
• A Look at the Roles Characters Play in Literature
• What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics
• Point of View in Grammar and Composition

Free Journalism Essay Examples & Topics

A journalism essay is a type of paper that combines personal records and reports. Besides news and facts, it should contain a story. An angle that creates a unique narrative of the events you are describing is crucial. However, let’s start with the definition.

No matter how often people hear about journalism, they still might get confused about what it is. It is an act of informative writing about news stories. It can be digital and non-digital, print and non-print. Journalists strive to present information in an interesting way while staying true to the source.

If you have seen journalistic article examples, you know there are two types. News can cover “hard stories”, meaning world events and politics, and “softer stories” about celebrities, science, etc. Journalism as a profession is multidimensional in nature. It can include texts, photography, interviews, and more. Content varies between different categories, such as literary reportage and yellow journalism.

Here, our experts have combined tips about how to write a good journalistic essay. We gathered information that will be useful for starting research and completing it. Moreover, you will find journalism topic ideas. You can use them for inspiration or to practice. Finally, underneath the article you will discover some stellar journalistic essay examples written by other students.

How to Write a Journalistic Essay

In this section, you’ll find tips that can help you start writing. However, nothing is more vital than choosing an appropriate journalism essay topic beforehand.

Before picking the subject, ask yourself several questions:

• What themes do I want to explore?
• What will my story be about?
• What points do I want to make?
• What is my attitude towards the topic?

Answering these questions can allow you to improve your storytelling. What’s more, look for one that can allow you to write intimately. Personal touches and views will influence your paper immensely. With all that in mind, try our free topic generator to get more ideas.

To write an outstanding journalistic essay, you should try these tips:

• Gather facts and references first.

Collect all the information you may need for your paper. For a story in journalism, you may be required to interview people or visit a location. Most importantly, you’ll have to research online. Also, you can read stories written by other people on the Internet to gain a better perspective.

• Organize your ideas and arguments before writing.

A good story is always organized. The structure of a journalistic should represent an inverted pyramid. The most crucial facts appear on the top, less important details go further, and extra information stays on the bottom. You can reflect in your writing. Organize all your arguments before writing, sticking to a logical structure.

• Rely on storytelling.

The story should become the main focus of your work. The writing should serve it and grab the reader’s attention from the start. Think about storytelling techniques that can keep your reader interested till the very end.

• Work on your style and language.

Another essential technique to keep your work both logical and engaging is to write in short sentences. If you search for any journalistic writing examples, you’ll see that’s how journalists write. The main goal of your paper is to deliver a clear and strong message. So, working on your style is going to help you further this agenda.

21 Journalism Essay Topics

There are so many journalism topics you can write about, and it can sometimes be challenging to stick to one. If you are still unsure what to describe and explore in your paper, this section can help you make this choice.

Here are some original journalism topic ideas:

• The way race impacts the news in different states in the US.
• Super Bowl as a phenomenon is more important than the game.
• Why people refuse to believe in climate change.
• How have sports changed international politics?
• Is creative writing in high school an essential subject?
• How vital is transparency in broadcast journalism?
• Is media responsible for the Covid-19 crisis in the US?
• Journalism as a profession can help change the world.
• A privacy issue between British journalism and the royal family.
• Are social media and blogging the future of journalism?
• The role of religion and race in Hollywood.
• Why has the Chinese economy risen so much over the past decade?
• How can media help in battling poverty in developing countries?
• Can music be used as political propaganda?
• Connections between social media and depression.
• Should mobile phones be allowed in educational institutions?
• Has the Internet impacted the way how newspapers and articles are written?
• Should fake news be banned on social media?
• What are the biggest challenges of investigative journalism?
• Can reality television be viewed as a type of journalism?
• How can athletes impact social awareness?

Thank you for reading the article! We hope you will find it helpful. Do not hesitate to share this article or a list of journalism essay examples with others. Good luck with your assignment!

264 Best Essay Examples on Journalism

Role of ict in communication essay.

• Words: 1962

Successful Interview Skills

Freedom of speech in social media essay.

• Words: 1799

Importance of Investigative Journalism in Today’s World

• Words: 2513

Traditional Media vs. New Media

• Words: 1393

Social Media Replacing Traditional Journalism

• Words: 2390

War and Violence Metaphors in Newspaper Headlines

David foster wallace on 9/11, as seen from the midwest, analysis of the magazine cover.

• Words: 1064

Do People Believe Everything in the Internet?

• Words: 1367

The Efforts and Activities of the Paparazzi are Protected by the Freedom of the Press Clause of the Constitution

• Words: 2824

News-Gathering and Production Practices

• Words: 1174

The Global Media Is All About Money and Profit Making

• Words: 2071

Journalism: Media Law and Ethics

• Words: 2625

Ethics in Entertainment Journalism

• Words: 5591

Media Systems Dependency Theory

• Words: 2740

Online vs. Print Journalism: What Is More Beneficial?

Impact of online social media in conflict situations.

• Words: 1388

Print Publishing vs. Digital Media

• Words: 1930

Dan Rather’s Involvement in the “Dead Air” Event

How does slavenka drakulić show that the “trivial is political”.

• Words: 1350

Law, Media and Communication

• Words: 2845

Importance of Ethics in Journalism

• Words: 1144

Different Types of Interview

Media law and ethics: integrity in media broadcasting.

• Words: 2257

Journalism. Australian Broadcasting Corporation

• Words: 2069

New York City Article at Wiki vs. New World Encyclopedia

A midsummer night’s dream: shakespeare’s play of dreaming, “analysis of causes of tragic fate in romeo and juliet based on shakespeare’s view of fate” by jie li, rolling stone magazine’s ethical and legal issues.

• Words: 1653

Propaganda in the Democratic Society

The criticism of “new media”.

• Words: 1150

Effects of the Media on Delivery of News

• Words: 1108

Ethics of Journalism: S.A.D Model Analysis

The analysis of the interview with lizzo by terry gross, research project: interview analysis, essential foundations of the public relations.

• Words: 3595

Plagiarism in the Real World: Jayson Blair and the New York Times

Journalism of the future and its improvements, ethical dilemma in journalism.

• Words: 1715

The Place and Importance of the Journalist in the War

• Words: 1009

“Understanding Media and Culture” by Jack Lule

• Words: 1749

Ann Patchett: My Year of No Shopping

Horace miner: body ritual among the nacirema, fashion magazines: print media isn’t dead and here’s why.

• Words: 3061

Broadcasting and proper use of media

Print media is dead.

• Words: 3601

Video and Audio Interviews vs. Personal Interviews

• Words: 3829

The Washington Post Newspaper’s History

Journalism: visual media’s role in news, journalism’s journey: the key principles, regulatory measures in chinese journalism, diversity in journalism practice, journalism as industrial art: the problem of journalism history, a journalist crisis in slovakia.

• Words: 1446

Reem N.: An Iconic Versatile Journalist

Business-journalism relations: the present realities.

• Words: 1105

Journalistic Accountability and Financial Crash

• Words: 3705

The Role of Journalism in Exposing Scandals in Ireland

• Words: 2225

Why Google Was Wrong Firing James Damore

• Words: 1119

Article’s Comparison: Genre, Target Audience, and Motivation

Cbs news unemployment report and its future impression, broadcasting authority act 1960 for journalism in ireland.

• Words: 1173

Sade Moore, Journalist’s Biography Issues

Reflection of an interview with the mass media worker, grammar of “digging deeper” article by arnold, alysia steele about interviewing, accident reporting and absence of humanity in media, writing methods in by zinczenko’s article “don’t blame the eater”, the us stand-up commediane williiam “bill” maher jr..

• Words: 3207

Campaigning Journalism – Facts or Specific Interests

• Words: 1093

Nicholas Carr’s Article: Position Statement

• Words: 1385

Kara Miller: Has COVID Made Us Too Clean?

Newspaper press apogee in the early 20th century.

• Words: 1913

“The Times Answers Spitzer Scandal Questions” and “Ashley Alexandra Dupree”

• Words: 1676

Critiquing Editorials in The Olympian and Tribune Papers

• Words: 1210

Volcanic Eruption in the “Threatened” Footage

Interview with a financier, the ethics of photo and video journalism, financial interview by alexander morrisey, biases and sources in newspaper articles about the coronavirus, good riddance to the media dinosaurs, news channel’s priorities: fox news special report, designing an influential interview.

• Words: 2591

Interview With Harib Alsheihi

• Words: 1346

US Attorney’s Office Press Release on Birmingham Crimes

Internet impact on journalism: print vs. online newspapers.

• Words: 1127

The Publications on IRRODL: Review

Blog response: developing different kinds of narratives, business knowledge management about journal ranking and it conferences, pestel review of canvas magazine, service encounter: customers interview, ‘the beach of dead whales’ by tatalo alamu: a response to editorial, visual rhetoric: the iraq war and torture of abu ghraib prisoners.

• Words: 1097

Journalism. Commercial Pressures vs. Fourth Estate Model

• Words: 1949

Journalism. Woman Assaulted by Neighbor Dies

Fabricating facts in a daily newspaper, past newspaper articles analysis: the new york times.

• Words: 1126

Journalism: News Access and Source Power

• Words: 2858

The Diversity of Human Experience: An Interview

Assessing the newsworthiness of homicide events, newspapers: commercialism and information.

• Words: 1547

Printed Publications’ Response to Online News

• Words: 2046

“Love Makes You Real” by Gardner and Knowles

• Words: 1535

Persuasive Argument About Journalistic Ethics

The elements of journalism by kovach & rosenstiel, the role of journalists and public relations professionals in information sphere.

• Words: 1625

The Interview With the Manager of Motorola Inc.

Media and communication in journalism firms.

• Words: 1124

MillerCoors Saves While Going Green

The use of reliable sources is crucial for journalism, how do journalists stay honest and not lose confidence, reporter’s privilege controversy.

• Words: 2237

Time Out Group Limited: Research About Magazine

• Words: 1753

The Breakdown of Paparazzi Work

• Words: 1654

William Randolph Hearst’s Personal, Professional and Political Life

• Words: 1082

Quality of the News Analysis

Hollinger international inc.: black conrad’s case, news reporting, journalism and the american history.

• Words: 1789

Power of Corporate America and Free Speech

• Words: 2916

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

What Does “Longform” Journalism Really Mean?

On love and ruin , terminology, and the anxiety of limits.

Writers are preoccupied with limits: temporal and physical and metaphysical, the divisions between self and other, the mind’s inability to reconstruct the subject of its fascination. Borges envisioned “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.” Moby-Dick ’s Ishmael claimed that “true places” resisted the attempts of mapmakers. Stories often assume the shape of their limitations. In 2006, the same year that Twitter launched, Robert Olen Butler published Severance , a story collection that employed what one reviewer called “a new—and unlikely to be replicated—art form, the vignette of the severed head told in exactly 240 words.”

For journalists, tasked with something like verisimilitude, these limits are always existential. Joe Gould claimed to be writing an oral history whose purview was the knowable world. Joseph Mitchell, who first profiled Gould for The New Yorker in 1942, came to doubt the history’s existence, and said as much after Gould’s death. Gould’s history was never published. Another New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, suspects Gould’s compulsive writing was hypergraphia. “This is an illness, a mania,” she wrote, “but seems more like something a writer might envy.” Perhaps Mitchell did; after his final piece on Gould, Mitchell never published another word. Like Gould’s productivity, Mitchell’s silence was storied but impossible to verify. Lepore wrote about both men in “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” a feature article whose word count grew into a book-length manuscript.

“Writers tumble into this story,” wrote Lepore, “and then they plummet.” The boundaries of the observable world push inward and outward; we are fathomless, the universe immeasurable. Where, then, should a story begin and end?

In the past decade, as declining ad revenue constricted editorial space in print publications, online publishing offered journalists freedom from some of their limits. A story could be as complicated as its subject required, and as long as necessary, though the ancient caveat still applied: your readers might not stick with you until the end. Websites such as BuzzFeed, whose content seemed to assume a newly attention-deficient readership, occasionally published pieces of narrative nonfiction whose word counts reached into the thousands. Online publishers began to label such stories “longform.”

Journalists and their readers have an uneasy history with such labels. “I have no idea who coined the term ‘the New Journalism’ or when it was coined,” wrote Tom Wolfe in a 1972 feature article in New York . “I have never even liked the term.” Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote to Wolfe and threatened to “have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.” (Wolfe still included Thompson in his 1973 anthology, The New Journalism .) “Creative nonfiction” still enjoys wide usage, and a magazine exists by the same name. Its editor, Lee Gutkind, writes that Creative Nonfiction “defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as ‘true stories well told.’” These labels amount to a shaggy taxonomy; journalists that share certain aesthetics are grouped together, and then those groups are differentiated from each other, to the presumed benefit of readers.

Such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. Most often, they reward the publisher. But a publisher’s loyalties can shift with the market. Medium, a publishing platform that developed an early reputation for longform journalism, distanced itself from the label. (“It was not our intention… to create a platform just for ‘long-form’ content,” said Ev Williams, Medium CEO and a co-founder of Twitter.) BuzzFeed, on the other hand, hired a “longform editor” in 2013 to oversee a section of the site devoted to such stories. The longform editor described his section as “BuzzFeed for people who are afraid of BuzzFeed.”

Whether labels like “longform” reward a story is another matter. “Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories,” wrote James Bennet in The Atlantic . “Yet there’s a real conundrum here: If ‘long-form’ doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism it has come to represent, from narrative to essay, profile to criticism?” The term “journalism” is, somehow, insufficient.

Taxonomy presents one conundrum; popularity makes for another. The “longform” label offers readers and writers a new way to self-identify, and a new hashtag by which they may find, distinguish and promote stories. An attendant risk is that a story’s appeal as a “longform” product could short-circuit editorial judgment and damage a writer or his subject before a large audience.

In 2014, Grantland published “ Dr. V’s Magical Putter ,” a 7,000-word profile of an inventor and transgender woman whose gender transition was revealed in the story—before she had revealed it to people in her life. “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention,” author Chris Hannan wrote, “had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.” Hannan reveals in his final paragraphs that his subject committed suicide, and wrote, “Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience.” In the New York Times , Jonathan Mahler cautioned readers and writers again “fetishizing the form and losing sight of its function.”

“Longform” springs from journalism’s anxiety over limitations—mainly, its online audience’s attention span. During the longform decade, software developers created programs that translate word counts into estimated reading times. Both Longreads.com and Longform.org use the program, as does Medium. For their first assignment, students of the late New York Times media critic David Carr wrote stories with estimated reading times of fewer than five minutes.

In 2011, The Atavist Magazine began to publish longform stories—“one blockbuster nonfiction story a month, generally between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” Since its inception, The Atavist ’s stories have been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards; the magazine’s first win, for 2015’s “Love and Ruin,” was also the first time the coveted “feature writing” award went to a digital magazine. While the magazine’s founder, Evan Ratliff, employs the “longform” label to describe The Atavist ’s work, he doesn’t fret about his audience’s attention span.

“The people who are making decisions based on that, I don’t think they’re doing it based on actual research, either,” he told Columbia Journalism Review a few months after The Atavist Magazine published its first story. “I think they’re all doing it based on anecdotal experience.” Ratliff concluded, “I don’t really care if attention spans are going down in the world overall or not.” And the universe—the unknowable curator of all the components of our stories—doesn’t care either.

Love and Ruin is a new anthology of stories culled from The Atavist ’s first five years. If labels like “longform” mean anything, then Love and Ruin is also the first collection of stories that typify a new genre, a successor to titles like Wolfe’s The New Journalism and Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism .

“‘Longform’ written storytelling . . . was, it was said, going the way of the black rhino,” Ratliff writes in his foreword. “Our magazine is built on questioning that wisdom.” Still, Ratliff doesn’t dwell on the word; if length can be considered a characteristic of each story in Love and Ruin , then it’s the one that interests him least.

Each story in Love and Ruin first appeared online, via the magazine’s proprietary platform, along with interview excerpts, original photography, embedded videos, and optional audiobook downloads. Most also came with an estimated reading time. The shortest story in Love and Ruin —Brooke Jarvis’ 10,000-word account of the year she spent working with leprosy patients in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, as the community and its last inhabitants dwindled—is classified online as a “44 minute read.” The longest stories clear 20,000 words, which means a time commitment equivalent to watching a feature film.

The ten stories in Love and Ruin fall comfortably within the word counts that The Atavist sets for its nonfiction, a range that contemporary readers expect from “longform.” But word counts and reading times are poor distinguishing features for a genre, a lackluster explanation for why these stories should appear together, and a useless tool for evaluating the rewards of the book.

The stories in Love and Ruin don’t share many sensibilities. Ratliff writes in his foreword that there is no “house style”—a suggestion that each Atavist story is told in something closer to each writer’s authentic voice. In her introduction, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean takes on journalism’s taxonomy problem, sets aside a few genre labels (“new journalism,” “creative nonfiction,” “longform”), and then classifies the stories in Love and Ruin as “magpie journalism.” It’s a laudatory phrase, but at a second glance it doesn’t distinguish the stories in Love and Ruin from plenty of others.

If the stories in Love and Ruin are bound by something other than glue, then it’s a sort of thematic unity, born from the same anxieties that gave us “longform.” Each story in Love and Ruin depicts its author’s struggle with the limits of investigation, representation, or understanding. “The Fort of Young Saplings” follows Vanessa Veselka’s tangential connection to a native Alaskan tribe back to the moment when that tribe’s history was overwritten. Jarvis’ story, “When We Are Called to Part,” approaches the same critical moment, when a community becomes a collection of stories, told selectively and bracketed by time. In “Mother, Stranger,” Cris Beam navigates the fog of her abusive mother’s mental illness and her own traumatic upbringing. “I didn’t have a language for my mother,” writes Beam, “probably because she didn’t have a cohesive language for herself.” The black boxes in Love and Ruin are figurative and sometimes literal; Adam Higginbotham’s “1,000 Pounds of Dynamite,” an anatomy of a failed extortion plot, features both.  

Underpinned by limits and all their attendant complications, the narratives that arise from Love and Ruin are fundamentally strange and unwieldy, and as long as they need to be. Leslie Jamison’s “52 Blue” provides Love and Ruin with its most luminous prose. But the story—about a solitary whale that sings at a unique and isolating frequency, and the people drawn to the whale’s story—also offers the anthology’s best consideration of the boundaries that shape stories and their telling.

“52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as a metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as a salve for loneliness,” Jamison writes. “What if we grant the whale his whaleness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still grant the contours of his second self—the one we’ve made—and admit what he’s done for us?”

Jamison does not reach her best ideas in few words. But without the words she uses, those ideas may not be otherwise reachable. A story’s word count can sometimes be a proxy for complexity; that’s the appeal of a label like “longform” for the readers that claim to love it. But complicated stories also refute “longform.” They leave their readers with a feeling that the story and its shape are an inevitable match. How else could it have been told?

Here, then, is The Atavist ’s chief achievement with Love and Ruin : In collecting its finest “longform” nonfiction, The Atavist created an anthology that undermines its own flimsy label—and, hopefully, refutes some of our anxiety about time and attention, and the other limits that govern our lives.

The anxiety of limitation—the dread of meaning lost, to time and to space—is recurrent. “Before there were even screens in our living rooms, the same worries reared their heads,” writes Nick Bilton in I Live in the Future, and Here’s How it Works . “There was a time in the 1920s when cultural critics feared Americans were losing their ability to swallow a long, thoughtful novel or even a detailed magazine piece. The evil culprit: Reader’s Digest .”

But the condensed and excerpted stories in Reader’s Digest didn’t bring about the end of attention, or of complicated storytelling. “Reader’s weren’t abandoning long stories for short ones,” writes Bilton. “The appeal of Reader’s Digest was in the overall experience.”

In 2001, David Foster Wallace—who died in the early years of the “longform” decade and whose nonfiction posthumously bears that label—reviewed a collection of prose poems. “These putatively ‘transgressive’ forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category, and formal conventions,” wrote Wallace, “since without such an established context there’s nothing much to transgress against.” Do away with some of those conventions and received ideas, and a genre seems more accommodating. Labels like “longform” and “prose poem” are unnecessary limitations; they may evoke a certain shape, but they also constrain it.

A few years ago, for his introduction to The Best American Magazine Writing , James Bennet wrote a short essay that later appeared online at The Atlantic , under the headline “Against ‘Long-Form Journalism.’” Bennet argues that the label is insubstantial and misleading, and then suggests “another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work—the one on the cover of this anthology. You might just call it all magazine writing.” But that’s like distinguishing between “book fiction” and “movie fiction,” and besides, “magazine journalism” conflates a story with a product. A medium like print may help to shape a story, but that medium is always just a tool in the service of a narrative, and media change. There will come a time when Best American Magazine Writing needs a new title.

All the stories we tell are products of limits. Time shatters histories and then hides a few pieces. Writers construct narratives and, inevitably, omit some details. Addressing the same issue in photography, Errol Morris asked, “Isn’t there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?” Perhaps the elephant is unimportant to the story. And yet, there he is.

Here’s the trade-off: Narratives require that we surrender our conceptions of time and space, that we readjust our ideas of what can be known and what might be said. They can be fallible by design but still leave understanding in their wake. A story, of any length, moves readers through the world without fracturing meaning. The world fractures meaning on its own.

So perhaps we can unburden ourselves of labels like “longform.” The Atavist has already begun to do just that; in 2014, the site stopped translating word counts into estimated reading times. And perhaps we can task ourselves with something more: that we read and write closer to those circumstances that bracket our lives, and simply take the time and space we need.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Brendan Fitzgerald

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Best of the Week: November 14 - 18, 2016

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Invest in news coverage you can trust.

Donate to PBS NewsHour by June 30 !

Teresa Crawford, Associated Press Teresa Crawford, Associated Press

John O'Connor, Associated Press John O'Connor, Associated Press

Leave your feedback

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-is-flag-day-heres-a-guide

What is Flag Day? Here’s a guide

WAUBEKA, Wis. (AP) — Each June, the people of Waubeka venerate perhaps the nation’s most enduring symbol, celebrating Flag Day, a holiday that escapes the notice of many Americans.

But this unincorporated Wisconsin town about 35 miles north of Milwaukee takes the day seriously. After all, it lays claim to being the birthplace of Flag Day, thanks to a tenacious teacher in a one-room schoolhouse.

Here are some things to know about the obscure flag-waving holiday.

What is Flag Day?

Flag Day commemorates June 14, 1777, when the Continental Congress determined the composition of the nation’s banner: “Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”

READ MORE: 8 things you didn’t know about the Fourth of July

President Woodrow Wilson issued a 1916 proclamation of June 14 as Flag Day and in 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed the formal observance into law. And it falls during Flag Week, after another congressional dictum in 1966.

What about July 4?

Yes, Independence Day makes prominent use of the flag. But the emblem is important enough to have its own day, according to David Janik, a Waubeka native and second-generation president of the National Flag Day Foundation.

“July 4th, we’re celebrating our independence,” Janik said. “But on Flag Day, we’re celebrating the birth of our flag, which is the symbol of our country, the symbol that is seen all around the world as the helper, the people who won’t leave you out in the cold.”

Why Waubeka?

On June 14, 1885, Bernard J. Cigrand, an 18-year-old Waubeka native teaching at Stony Hill School, put a flag in his inkwell and assigned his students an essay about what the flag means to them. Cigrand left the next year for dental school in Chicago, but he never gave up his advocacy for a national day dedicated to the flag.

Cigrand realized his dream in 1916 when Wilson issued his proclamation.

Although he died in 1932, Waubeka never forgot Cigrand and in 1946, community leaders established the town’s Flag Day celebration, which has run continuously since then.

Any other ‘first’ Flag Days?

Yes. The earliest mention of Flag Day involves a man named George Morris who organized such a commemoration on June 14, 1861, in Hartford, Connecticut, marked by a patriotic program and prayers for Union Army success in a young Civil War. But apparently, the festivities were never repeated.

Pennsylvanians will challenge Cigrand’s coronation as “Father of Flag Day.” Pittsburgh native William T. Kerr began his advocacy in 1888 and a year later became national chairman of the American Flag Day Foundation, holding that position for a half a century. Kerr was among those standing beside Truman when he signed the Flag Day law.

As for the expected friendly rivalry, Janik said his father, the late Jack Janik, “took care of that.” The elder Janik traveled to Washington and lobbied Congress, which in 2004 adopted a resolution naming Waubeka “the birthplace of Flag Day.”

What about the essays?

Along with the parade, the bands, the patriotism awards, the military honor guards and a dog named Harlow who turns 8 on Flag Day and sported a red, white and blue boater on her head, there are the essays.

In the spirit of Cigrand and his students of 139 years ago, the Waubeka Flag Day celebration includes an annual essay contest and draws entries from across the nation — this year from New York to Nevada and Wisconsin to Texas.

The Stars and Stripes “represent a nation where immigrants like my grandparents are welcomed, where diversity is celebrated and where justice is present for all,” wrote Neel Sood, a 4th grader from Bridgewater, New Jersey.

Adell, Wisconsin 7th grader Ryan Spang wrote that “the American flag represents unity. We are one nation, united by our similarities and differences. We support people in our communities in times of need and we cheer them on in times of achievement.”

Why isn’t it a day off?

Flag Day isn’t like Thanksgiving, Memorial Day and a smattering of other federal holidays that generally mean Americans can spend the day off work.

Instead, it’s officially recognized nationwide, and government services are still open and the mail still gets delivered. Only Pennsylvania marks it as a state holiday, allowing residents to stay home from work and school.

But another backyard barbecue isn’t required to feel the love in Waubeka.

“Our passion for the flag here is very deep,” Janik said. “The flag is the symbol of our country — it symbolizes individualism, success, loss, daring, chivalry. People need a compass to guide them, and the flag is a great compass.”

O’Connor reported from Springfield, Illinois.

Support Provided By: Learn more

Support PBS NewsHour:

Educate your inbox

Subscribe to Here’s the Deal, our politics newsletter for analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

Thank you. Please check your inbox to confirm.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Is A.I. Art Stealing from Artists?

By Kyle Chayka

Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post , suggested “Kelly McKernan” as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create “Lord of the Rings”-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, “Star Wars.” On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts. The resulting images—of owls, cyborgs, gothic funeral scenes, and alien motorcycles—were distinctly reminiscent of McKernan’s works. “It just got weird at that point. It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told me. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.”

Last month, McKernan joined a class-action lawsuit with two other artists, Sarah Andersen and Karla Ortiz, filed by the attorneys Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri, against Midjourney and two other A.I. imagery generators, Stable Diffusion and DreamUp. (Other tools, such as DALL-E , run on the same principles.) All three models make use of LAION -5B, a nonprofit, publicly available database that indexes more than five billion images from across the Internet, including the work of many artists. The alleged wrongdoing comes down to what Butterick summarized to me as “the three ‘C’s”: The artists had not consented to have their copyrighted artwork included in the LAION database; they were not compensated for their involvement, even as companies including Midjourney charged for the use of their tools; and their influence was not credited when A.I. images were produced using their work. When producing an image, these generators “present something to you as if it’s copyright free,” Butterick told me, adding that every image a generative tool produces “is an infringing, derivative work.”

Copyright claims based on questions of style are often tricky. In visual art, courts have sometimes ruled in favor of the copier rather than the copied. When the artist Richard Prince incorporated photographs by Patrick Cariou into his work, for instance, a 2013 court case found that some of the borrowing was legal under transformative use—Prince had changed the source material enough to escape any claim of infringement. In music, recent judgments tend to be more conservative. Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams lost a 2013 case against the Marvin Gaye estate, which alleged that their song “Blurred Lines” was too close to Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” The intellectual-property lawyer Kate Downing wrote, in a recent essay on Butterick and Saveri’s suit published on her personal Web site, that the A.I. image generators might be closer to the former than the latter: ​​“It may well be argued that the ‘use’ of any one image from the training data is . . . not substantial enough to call the output a derivative work of any one image.” “Mathematically speaking, the work comes from everything,” Downing told me.

But Butterick and Saveri allege that what A.I. generators do falls short of transformative use. There is no transcending of the source material, just a mechanized “blending together,” Butterick said. “We’re not litigating image by image, we’re litigating the whole technique behind the system.” The litigators are not alone. Last week, Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion alleging that the generator’s use of Getty stock photography amounts to “brazen infringement . . . on a staggering scale.” Whatever their legal strengths, such claims possess a certain moral weight. A.I. generators could not operate without the labor of humans like McKernan who unwittingly provide source material. As the technology critic and philosopher Jaron Lanier wrote in his 2013 book “ Who Owns the Future? ,” “Digital information is really just people in disguise.” (A spokesperson from Stability AI, the studio that developed Stable Diffusion, said in a statement that “the allegations in this suit represent a misunderstanding of how generative A.I. technology works and the law surrounding copyright,” but provided no further detail. Neither DeviantArt, which owns DreamUp, nor Midjourney responded to requests for comment.)

Visual artists began reaching out to Butterick after he and Saveri filed a lawsuit, last November, in the related but distinct realm of software copyrights. The target of the earlier suit was Copilot, an A.I.-driven coding assistant developed by GitHub and OpenAI. Copilot is trained on code that is publicly available online. Coders who post their projects on open-source platforms retain the copyright to their work—under certain licenses, anyone who uses the code must credit its creator. Copilot did not. Like the artists whose work feeds Midjourney, human coders suddenly found their specialized labor reproduced infinitely, quickly, and cheaply without attribution. Butterick and Saveri’s legal complaint (against OpenAI, GitHub, and Microsoft, which acquired GitHub in 2018) argued that Copilot’s actions amount to “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” In January, the defendants filed to have the case dismissed . “We will file oppositions to these motions,” Butterick said.

Butterick told me that, given the proliferation of A.I., “everybody who creates for a living should be in code red.” Writers had their turn to be spooked in January, when BuzzFeed announced that it would use OpenAI’s new large language model, ChatGPT , to augment its creation of quizzes. McKernan, who draws income from print sales as well as commissioned illustrations, told me they suspect that the amount of work available in their field is already declining as A.I. tools become more accessible online. “There are publishers that are using A.I. instead of hiring cover artists,” McKernan told me. “I can pay my rent with just one cover, and we’re seeing that already disappearing.” They added, “We’re just the canaries in the coal mine.”

In some sense, you could say that artists are losing their monopoly on being artists. With generative A.I., any user can become an author of sorts. In late January, Mayk.it, a Los Angeles-based music-making app, released Drayk.it, a Web site that allowed users to create A.I.-generated Drake songs based on a given prompt. The results could not be mistaken for actual Drake tracks; they tend toward the lo-fi and the absurd. But they possess a certain fundamental Drakeness: lounge beats, depressive lyrics, monotone delivery. The company’s head of product, Neer Sharma, told me that users had created hundreds of thousands of A.I. Drake songs, a new track every three seconds. The site drew upon software resources such as Tacotron and Uberduck, which generate voices and offer specific voice models, including one trained on the œuvre of Drake. The Web site includes a disclaimer that the songs it generates are parodies, which are protected under fair use, and Sharma told me that the company didn’t receive any complaints from Drake’s camp. But the site has already shut down. The project was designed “just to test out the tech,” Sharma said. “We didn’t expect it to get this big.” The team is now preparing more “A.I. music drops.”

As Sharma sees it, the increasing accessibility of A.I. means that “everything just becomes remixable.” The artists who might thrive in this scenario are those who have the most replicable or exportable “vibe and aesthetic,” he said, among them Drake, the rare pop star who has embraced his status as an open-ended meme. Fans could already dress like Drake or act like him; now they can make his music, too, and the line between fan and creator will blur further as the generative technology improves. Sharma said that the company has heard from executives at music labels who are interested in exploring the creation of A.I. voice models for their artists. He predicted that musicians who resist being “democratized”—giving creative agency to their fans—will be left behind. “The people who could win before just by being there will not necessarily win tomorrow,” Sharma said.

A startup called Authentic Artists is seeking to bypass human artists altogether by creating musician characters based on A.I.-generated styles of music. Its label, WarpSound, features “virtual artists” like GLiTCH, a computer-rendered figure derived from a Bored Ape Yacht Club N.F.T., who plays genres such as “chillwave” and “glitch hop” in endlessly streaming feeds of auto-generated music. Authentic Artists’ founder Chris McGarry told me that the character is meant to give a face to the A.I. machine. “We wanted to answer the question, what is the source of the music? A semiconductor or cloud-based server or ones and zeros didn’t seem to be a terribly interesting answer to that question,” he said.

Listening to Authentic Artists’ music, however, is a bit like trying to enjoy the wavering buzz of highway traffic. If you’re not paying attention, it can serve as a passable background soundtrack, but the moment you tune in closely any sense of coherent sound gives way to an uncanny randomness. It called to my mind a much-memed comment that the Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki made after being shown a particularly grotesque A.I.-generated animation in 2016: “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” I wouldn’t go quite so far, but Authentic Artists’ project does strike me as an insult to human-made music. They can manufacture sound, but they can’t manufacture the feeling or creative intention that even the most amateur musicians put into a recording.

Kelly McKernan sometimes snoops on conversations about generative A.I. on Reddit or Discord chats, in part to see how users perceive the role of original artists in the A.I. image-making process. McKernan said that they often see people criticizing artists who are against A.I.: “They have this belief that career artists, people who have dedicated their whole lives to their work, are gatekeeping, keeping them from making the art they want to make. They think we’re élitist and keeping our secrets.” Defenders of A.I. art-making could point out that artists have always taken from and riffed on each other’s work, from the ancient Romans making copies of even older Greek sculptures to Roy Lichtenstein reproducing comic-book frames as highbrow Pop art. Maybe A.I. imagery is just a new wave of appropriation art? (It lacks any conceptual intention, however.) Downing, the intellectual-property lawyer, argued in her piece that the prompts that users input into A.I. generators may amount to independent acts of invention. “There is no Stable Diffusion without users pouring their own creative energy into its prompts,” she wrote.

McKernan told me about Beep Boop Art, a Facebook group with forty-seven thousand followers that posts A.I.-generated art and runs an online storefront selling prints and merchandise. The images tend toward the fantastical: a wizard hat or a lunar landscape in a Lisa Frank-ish style, or a tree house growing above the ocean. It may not be a direct riff on McKernan’s work, but it does reflect a banal over-all sameness across generated art. McKernan described typical A.I. style as having “this general sugary, candy look,” adding, “It looks pretty, but it tastes terrible. It has no depth, but it serves the purpose that they want.” The new generation of tools offers the instant gratification of a single image, shorn of the messy association with a single, living artist. One question is who gets to profit from such works. Another is more existential. “It kind of boils down to: what is art?” McKernan said. “Is art the process, is art the human component, is art the conversation? All of that is out of the picture once you’re just generating it.” ♦

New Yorker Favorites

A prison therapist grapples with a sex offender’s release .

What have fourteen years of conservative rule done to Britain ?

Woodstock was overrated .

Why walking helps us think .

A whale’s strange afterlife .

The progressive politics of Julia Child .

I am thrilled to announce that nothing is going on with me .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Kelefa Sanneh

By E. Tammy Kim

By Burkhard Bilger

• Fellowships
• Business Models
• Mobile & Apps
• Audience & Social
• Aggregation & Discovery
• Reporting & Production
• Translations

What’s with the rise of “fact-based journalism”?

Here’s a term you may be hearing with increasing frequency: “Fact-based journalism.” The Associated Press uses it in fund-raising appeals , as does ProPublica , and our local NPR affiliate. The National Association of Broadcasters and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting both describe themselves as purveyors of “fact-based journalism” in their public relations materials.

Even news outlets with an overtly partisan bent employ some variation of the term. The right-leaning The Dispatch , for instance, describes itself as a source of “fact-based conservative news.” The U.S. Agency for International Development uses the term as a guiding concept for its media development work.

When and why did this term rise to prominence? We did a keyword search of “fact-based journalism” in NewsBank , a news repository of over 12,000 sources, for the years 1990 through 2023.

As the graph below indicates, usage of the term ballooned starting in 2016 and saw a big spike in 2021. And as the graph also indicates, the term “fact-based journalism” was rarely used prior to the early 2000s.

The increasing usage of the term corresponds with the beginning of Trump’s presidency. Given this timing, we next conducted a parallel search of the term “fake news.” Our suspicion was that the term “fact-based journalism” arose in response to the rise of the notion of “fake news” that so dominated the discourse around journalism and politics during the Trump presidency . The results support our hypothesis.

As the next graph indicates, usage of the term “fact-based journalism” began escalating right as the term “fake news” took off in popularity. Though correlation doesn’t guarantee causality, the pattern below strongly suggests that the term’s use in the news industry may have been a response to the prevalence of “fake news” discourse within politics and the media.

As we noted above, usage of the term “fact-based journalism” experienced a massive spike in usage in 2021, when Trump was no longer president and usage of the term “fake news” had subsided. An examination of stories published in 2021 suggests why: That year, the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, who pushed back against authoritarian regimes. The Nobel Committee hailed their work as indicative of the power of “free, independent, and fact-based journalism,” and this phrase appeared in multiple stories about the awarding of the prize.

As the graphs indicate, the use of “fact-based journalism” has remained relatively high in the years since the Nobel announcement, suggesting that the phrase has become an established part of the vocabulary around journalism.

As our politics and media have grown more polarized, and as the barriers to entry to operating a “news” organization evaporated, the media ecosystem has become a breeding ground for misinformation posing as news . In such an environment, identifying some approaches to journalism, or some news organizations, as bastions of “fact-based journalism” has become a way of trying to distinguish legitimate journalism from the rest of the dreck.

Similarly, as the Trump era ushered in the strategy of politicians slandering legitimate reporting as “fake news,” self-identifying as “fact-based journalism” became a way for news organizations to push back against efforts by politicians or hyperpartisan media outlets to discredit them.

However, while there may be compelling reasons to embrace the term “fact-based journalism,” doing so represents a damaging concession. To describe one form of journalism as “fact-based” is to tacitly acknowledge that there is also such a thing as “non-fact-based journalism.” And there isn’t.

“Fact-based journalism” is what linguists call a pleonasm — a redundancy in linguistic expression, like “black darkness.” All journalism is fact-based. If it’s not, then it’s not journalism.

Sure, opinion and partisanship have long played prominent roles in journalism . But for opinion to merit the label “opinion journalism ,” or for partisan reporting to merit being called “partisan journalism ,” they still need to be grounded in fact. (Interpretation of those shared facts can, of course, differ.)

The widespread embrace of the term “fact-based journalism” within the journalism community is a capitulation to those who are undermining the very notion of journalism, and thereby destabilizing the foundations of our democracy. We need to do more to defend and evangelize the parameters of journalism, not cede linguistic space to those seeking to blur these parameters as part of a broader political strategy.

If some sort of qualifier is indeed necessary in this age of widespread efforts to disguise falsity and political influence operations as journalism, then how about a term that goes on the offensive — perhaps “legitimate journalism” or “authentic journalism”? Such terms better distinguish organizations that are producing journalism from those that are making a mockery of it.

Philip M. Napoli is the James R. Shepley Professor of Public Policy, in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, where he is also the director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. Asa Royal is an associate in research in the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy, where he leads research initiatives on topics such as the economics and impact of local journalism, and the rise of “pink slime” news networks.

Cite this article Hide citations

Napoli, Philip M.. "What’s with the rise of “fact-based journalism”?." Nieman Journalism Lab . Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 29 May. 2024. Web. 12 Jun. 2024.

Napoli, P. (2024, May. 29). What’s with the rise of “fact-based journalism”?. Nieman Journalism Lab . Retrieved June 12, 2024, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/05/whats-with-the-rise-of-fact-based-journalism/

Napoli, Philip M.. "What’s with the rise of “fact-based journalism”?." Nieman Journalism Lab . Last modified May 29, 2024. Accessed June 12, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/05/whats-with-the-rise-of-fact-based-journalism/.

{{cite web     | url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/05/whats-with-the-rise-of-fact-based-journalism/     | title = What’s with the rise of “fact-based journalism”?     | last = Napoli     | first = Philip M.     | work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]     | date = 29 May 2024     | accessdate = 12 June 2024     | ref = {{harvid|Napoli|2024}} }}

To promote and elevate the standards of journalism

Covering thought leadership in journalism

Pushing to the future of journalism

Exploring the art and craft of story

The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.

It’s a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University .

• Subscribe to our email
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook
• Download our iPhone app
• Subscribe via RSS
• Tweet archive

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Welcome to the Purdue Online Writing Lab

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

The Online Writing Lab (the Purdue OWL) at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

The On-Campus and Online versions of Purdue OWL assist clients in their development as writers—no matter what their skill level—with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement. The Purdue OWL serves the Purdue West Lafayette and Indianapolis campuses and coordinates with local literacy initiatives. The Purdue OWL offers global support through online reference materials and services.

Social Media

Facebook twitter.

12 episodes

Writer, journalist, and podcast producer, Callie Hitchcock interviews writers, journalists, and authors about their essays, articles, reporting, nonfiction books, and memoirs. A heterogenous mix of subjects and writers where you can learn something new about the world or think about an idea in a new way. Follow me on Twitter: @cal_hitchcock

Nonfiction with Callie Hitchcock Callie Hitchcock

• Society & Culture
• JUN 11, 2024

Emily Nussbaum: Author of Cue The Sun! The Invention of Reality TV

Today’s guest is Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer prize winner for criticism, staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of her new book Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV. We talk about the history of reality TV, the changing conception of reality TV labor power dynamics, reality tv as modern fables, the sociological function of reality TV as a cultural object, and what feelings we are looking to have when we watch TV. The Difficult Women of “Sex and the City” by Emily Nussbaum I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum

• 1 hr 12 min
• MAY 28, 2024

Michael Cecchi-Azzolina: Author of Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D⁠’

I speak with Michael Cecchi-Azzolina about his memoir called Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’ about being a maître d’ in New York City’s top restaurants from the 80s onward. This book is a historical time capsule of the culture of the past 40 years and a meditation of the restaurant as a dense site of psychology, theater, familial simulation, and the joy of communion. We discuss all of this and the changing social role of restaurants with the introduction of the internet age and shifting social mores.  Cecchi’s restaurant My food blog Food Fantasy with NYC restaurant recommendations, contemplations of food phenomenology, funny food PR stories, and more!

• MAY 7, 2024

Michael W. Clune: Author of White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin

I talk with Michael W. Clune about White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, his memoir about his heroin addiction and his recovery. His writing is experiential, poetic, philosophical, and dwells on the liminal. Clune defamiliarizes experiences and reassembles them with new language. He also puts language to experiences that haven’t been entered yet into the collective imagination. We discuss the rhetoric of perception, unpeeling perception away from language, Candy Land, and Don Quixote. “The Anatomy of Panic” Harper's essay by Michael Clune  My essay about the peak and evanescence of my fixation with the rom com Home Again that I discuss in the episode.

• APR 24, 2024

Tony Tulathimutte: Author of "The Rejection Plot"

Tony Tulathimutte on the podcast today. He has written the novel Private Citizens, and a short story collection called Rejection coming out this September (pre-order here). On this episode we talk about his recent nonfiction essay for The Paris Review called “The Rejection Plot.” We explore the experiential properties of rejection, plotlessness, the delamination of an infatuation narrative from real life, and entitativity. Other links:  Tony’s CRIT writing workshops  “The Feminist” short story in N+1

• APR 9, 2024

Emmeline Clein: Author of Dead Weight

I spoke with Emmeline Clein, author of the new book Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm about the cultural forces surrounding eating disorders and beauty standards in the US, and their roots in racism, classism, and nationalism. We talk about the different historic forms eating disorders have mutated through over time, the failures of health insurance and treatment centers, and more!  My review of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv Follow me on Twitter.

• FEB 27, 2024

Sarah Hepola: Author of ⁠Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget⁠

“I didn’t think I ran the risk of dying I though I ran the risk of not living the life that I wanted to live.” On today’s episode I speak with Sarah Hepola, a journalist and the author of the book Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, which is a nuanced and articulate memoir of Sarah’s life and her experiences with blackouts, all leading to her journey to sobriety. Check out her podcast America's Girls and Smoke ‘Em If You Got 'Em.

• © Callie Hitchcock

Top Podcasts In Society & Culture

You might also like.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Another Pro Athlete Is Banned for Life for Gambling. He Won’t Be the Last.

By Leigh Steinberg

Mr. Steinberg is a sports agent who has represented athletes such as Troy Aikman, Manny Ramirez and Patrick Mahomes.

This essay has been updated to reflect news developments.

Some of the biggest scandals in sports history have revolved around players and gambling. Pete Rose is barred for life from baseball, in an agreement stemming from admissions of gambling . The Black Sox scandal , about a thrown World Series, is perhaps the most notorious sports debacle of all time.

Yet in a rush to embrace the potential profits provided by new forms of legalized sports gambling, the professional sports leagues have put players, and the people close to them, under untenable pressure. I have represented professional athletes for 50 years and I have never seen a situation that’s more perilous to them and the integrity of sports.

These aren’t just hypothetical concerns. This week, Major League Baseball barred Tucupita Marcano, an infielder for the San Diego Padres, from baseball for life after discovering he had bet nearly $90,000 on M.L.B. games in 2022 and 2023. Four other players were suspended for placing bets on M.L.B. games while playing in the minor leagues. Earlier this year, Jontay Porter, a center for the Toronto Raptors, was barred for life from the N.B.A. after a league investigation found that he’d shared confidential information with a bettor, resulting in large wagers on his performance. As the new baseball season was starting, federal prosecutors said the interpreter for the star pitcher Shohei Ohtani had stolen millions from Mr. Ohtani to pay off gambling debts to an illegal sports bookie. Major League Baseball is investigating Mr. Ohtani’s former teammate David Fletcher over allegations that he placed bets with the same bookie.

Pro sports depends on authenticity and credibility. Fans must believe that the games are fair and that each athlete is making the maximum effort to win. Any suggestion that the contests might be fixed or tainted will destroy the industry.

The appearance of integrity has always been central to the success of sports. When I started as an agent a half-century ago, the major leagues all considered it so crucial to maintain distance between the worlds of gambling and athletics that they agreed that Las Vegas — then the only place where sports gambling was legal — should not have professional franchises.

Everything changed when, on May 14, 2018, in the case of Murphy v. N.C.A.A., the Supreme Court struck down a decades-old federal law that effectively banned sports betting outside Nevada. Within weeks, New Jersey had established legitimate sports betting at its casinos and racetracks. Thirty-seven states quickly followed suit.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .