Lecturer Today, I'm going to be talking about amateur Journalism; in other words, journalism practised by ordinary people. not professional journalists. For people like you, who want to get some real writing experience, this can be a good way to get started, and later I'll be offering you some practical tips to help you.
Amateur journalists are providing more and more news. I think the main cause of this change has been the Internet. 1Nowadays, anyone close to an important event can write a report and email it to a newspaper, or they can take a photo with a digital camera or use their mobile phone to make a video film of what's happening.
2Also, amateur journalism isn't just for people who are in the right place at the right time. People can now write reports and articles about things which a big organisation might not be interested in and post their ideas on their website or blog. This means that all sorts of people can express their views.
3Also, in the past, if you wanted to make your opinions known, one of the few ways of doing this was to send a letter to a newspaper, but normally newspapers only print a few of the thousands of letters they receive each day. Now, people can write about the things which are really important to them and the people around them and they put it in a blog. 4As a result. amateur journalists often write about something which is a local issue. and by 'local issue'·. I mean something happening in the school in their area or the traffic in their town, but not something necessarily of national or international interest.
Amateur journalism is a growing phenonemon. 5There are now major online newspapers. Ohmynews in South Korea, for example, has a large number of readers, and for this reason, they can attract advertising and get income from this. And, as a result, it's become a profitable business.
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Lecturer But how can you get involved? How can you begin to write articles which will be published on sites like these?
Well, first you must have something Interesting to say, something you want to communicate with readers. Assuming you have this, it's important in an article to attract people's attention and gain their interest, so put the main facts first. answering these questions: Who? Why? When? How? and Where?
Get those basic facts down to start with and get people interested. 6Then fill in the details in the rest of the article: the best model is really shaped like a pyramid. You put the most important facts at the top of the article and lots of smaller details down below.
7Remember, you want people to keep reading, so you need to hold your readers' interest. A really good technique for doing that is to put in quotations from people who are part of the story - what they really said. You know the sort of thing, um, 'Tanya, mother of two, said: "It all happened so quickly that we didn't have time to react."' Quotations bring the article alive.
8Once you've written your article, go over it again to make sure that any figures you quote are correct. Make sure that Tanya really has two children and not one or three. Then, after that, once you've got your ideas down, rewrite your article, making sure that your paragraphs don't contain more than three sentences - people like them to be brief and to the point, and this will help to hold their attention.
And another thing to bear in mind : if they're reading online, people will soon stop reading your piece and start reading something else, so keep the whole article brief. 9Don't put in a conclusion - just let your article end without it.
Another good piece of advice is to remember that old cliche' which we've all heard - that a picture is worth a thousand words. It's true, so if you can, include a picture. It'll attract more attention and illustrate what you've been saying.
10Finally, you need to write a headline - something eye-catching which will get people to just skim the article to start with, and then, if it's well written, they'll read it more carefully afterwards.
