Human Interest

In journalism, a human interest story is a feature story that discusses a person, or people, or a companion animal in an emotional way. It presents people and their problems, concerns, or achievements in a way that brings about interest, sympathy or motivation in the reader or viewer.

Kata Hikmah

News Values

The secret to getting those news placements is in understanding this news values list: impact, timeliness, prominence, proximity, the bizarre, conflict, currency and human interest.

What is Churnalism?

Churnalism is a form of journalism which differs from the traditional or original journalism that we all know. In this type of journalism, reporters rely heavily on press releases in order to create news stories and articles in the media at a faster and cheaper rate. In churnalism, journalists and reporters literally ‘churn out news’ they receive from PR representatives.

Churnalism has been heavily frowned upon by many experts in the industry. Many see it as an enemy and killer of real journalism.

One of the major reasons why many news organizations today are practicing Churnalism is because of the fact that they want to cut down on cost. As a result of this they don’t bother making any further research into the prepackaged material that they have received and go ahead to publish it or broadcast it to the public.

Some media organizations also engage in churnalism because of the strong competition out there and constricts of time.

The term churnalism was coined by BBC journalist Waseem Zakir in 2008 after he noticed what was going on in journalism. It just seemed to him that journalists were leaving behind true journalism and engaging in what he saw as ‘churning out news stories’ without any research into the stories they received. According to Zakir, reporters because they want to beat the pressures of time and cost are now turning into ‘churnalists’ instead of journalists.

In his book entitled Flat Earth News, British journalist Nick Davies wrote disparagingly about churnalism and made the term even more famous.

According to Nick Davies, as a result of churnalism, many stories published are not original. He said that journalists these days are no longer gathering and researching into news but are rather engaging in the act of processing stories that they get in the wires hence journalists ‘churn out news’ these days.  As a result of this there has been a massive decline in original journalism, which has also led to a dramatic reduction in the quality and accuracy of news stories that are published by newspapers.

Why do news media organizations engage in churnalism instead of original journalism?

The answer is simple – because of economic reasons and time factor.

• Financial issues have left so many newspapers to indulge in churnalism which has proven to be a cheaper option than original or real journalism which involves a great deal of money being put into research and investigations.  Today, as a result of low advertisement revenues, many newspapers have decided to cut down cost drastically by reducing the number of journalists that they employ. For this reason, newspapers and other media organizations are always looking for cheaper ways to produce news stories. And one of the cheapest ways to do this is by turning to churnalism.
• The need to beat time. Time constraint has also contributed massively to journalists turning to churnalism. The competition among various news media organizations has contributed massively in bringing a decline in the practice of original journalism. Today every newspaper or media organization wants to be the first to report on a story. There is always the need to beat the competition and get the story up as soon as possible. And the easiest way to go about achieving this is by journalists turning into ‘churnalists’.

Food

Mohamed Saleh di hadapan restoran Ayu Steamboat & Grill yang diusahakannya.

 

 

Steamboat serendah RM12.90

SHAH ALAM - Menyediakan 11 menu merangkumi 52 jenis makanan laut, sayur-sayuran dan daging dengan harga serendah RM12.90, Ayu Steamboat & Grill tentunya pilihan tepat untuk memenuhi ‘selera besar’ anda.

Pemiliknya, Mohamed Saleh Hussien Abd Ghani berkata, menggunakan tagline ‘Ingat Sos Ingat Ayu, Biar Rasa Yang Menilai’, sudah tentu rahsia keenakan hidangannya terletak pada sos dihasilkan.

“Di sini juga ada pelbagai menu makanan bergoreng dan pembuka selera. Terlalu banyak pilihan istimewa, sedia untuk anda pilih.

“Paling istimewa adalah Ayu Magic Sos for Steamboat dan The Real Original Black Pepper Sos for Grill. Hasil kombinasi kedua-dua sos ini adalah cetusan tagline restoran kami,” katanya.

Harga bufet yang ditawarkan juga cukup rendah bagi memberi peluang kepada penduduk setempat yang kebanyakannya berpendapatan rendah dan sederhana, merasai keenakan makanan di restoran ini.

“Harga yang ditawarkan RM21.90 dewasa, RM12.90 kanak-kanak berumur 7 hingga 12 tahun, RM14.90 untuk warga emas dan OKU RM15.90,” katanya.

Menurutnya, dia yakin pelanggan akan ‘ketagih’ untuk menikmati hidangan di Ayu Steamboat & Grill kerana keenakan rasa hidangan selain harga murah dan saiz hidangan yang besar.

“Sekali cuba anda pasti kembali kerana keenakan sos steamboat kami tidak akan didapati di tempat lain. Tambahan, hidangan kami sedap, murah dan banyak!

“Jangan lupa berkunjung ke restoran kami di Jalan Nagasari C/36 Seksyen 36, Desa Latania, Shah Alam, manakala waktu operasi 6.30 petang hingga 11.30 malam,” katanya. - Sinar Harian

What is Data Journalism?

What is data journalism? I could answer, simply, that it is journalism done with data. But that doesn’t help much.

Both ‘data’ and ‘journalism’ are troublesome terms. Some people think of ‘data’ as any collection of numbers, most likely gathered on a spreadsheet. 20 years ago, that was pretty much the only sort of data that journalists dealt with. But we live in a digital world now, a world in which almost anything can be — and almost everything is — described with numbers.

Your career history, 300,000 confidential documents, who knows who in your circle of friends can all be (and are) described with just two numbers: zeroes, and ones. Photos, video and audio are all described with the same two numbers: zeroes and ones. Murders, disease, political votes, corruption and lies: zeroes and ones.

What makes data journalism different to the rest of journalism? Perhaps it is the new possibilities that open up when you combine the traditional ‘nose for news’ and ability to tell a compelling story, with the sheer scale and range of digital information now available.

And those possibilities can come at any stage of the journalist’s process: using programming to automate the process of gathering and combining information from local government, police, and other civic sources, as Adrian Holovaty did with ChicagoCrime and then EveryBlock.

Or using software to find connections between hundreds of thousands of documents, as The Telegraph did with MPs' expenses.

Data journalism can help a journalist tell a complex story through engaging infographics. Hans Rosling’s spectacular talks on visualizing world poverty with Gapminder, for example, have attracted millions of views across the world. And David McCandless’s popular work in distilling big numbers — such as putting public spending into context, or the pollution generated and prevented by the Icelandic volcano — shows the importance of clear design at Information is Beautiful.

Or it can help explain how a story relates to an individual, as the BBC and the Financial Times now routinely do with their budget interactives (where you can find out how the budget affects you, rather than ‘Joe Public’). And it can open up the news gathering process itself, as The Guardian do so successfully in sharing data, context, and questions with their Datablog.

Data can be the source of data journalism, or it can be the tool with which the story is told — or it can be both. Like any source, it should be treated with scepticism; and like any tool, we should be conscious of how it can shape and restrict the stories that are created with it.

— Paul Bradshaw, Birmingham City University

What is new journalism?

  In the thirty years since Tom Wolfe published his manifesto, "The New Journalism," a group of writers has been quietly securing a place at the very center of contemporary American literature for reportorially based, narrative-driven long form nonfiction. These New New Journalists–Adrian LeBlanc, Michael Lewis, Lawrence Weschler, Eric Schlosser, Richard Preston, Alex Kotlowitz, Jon Krakauer, William Langewiesche, Lawrence Wright, William Finnegan, Ted Conover, Jonathan Harr, Susan Orlean, and others–represent the continued maturation of American literary journalism. They use the license to experiment with form earned by the New Journalists of the sixties to address the social and political concerns of 19th century writers such as Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis and Stephen Crane (an earlier generation of "New Journalists"), synthesizing the best of these two traditions. Rigorously reported, psychologically astute, sociologically sophisticated and politically aware, the New New Journalism may well be the most popular and influential development in the history of American literary nonfiction. The New New Journalism d explores the methods and techniques these journalists have developed, and looks backward to understand their dual heritage -- their debts to their predecessors from both the 1890s and the1960s.
           The New New Journalists bring a distinct set of cultural and social concerns to their work. Neither frustrated novelists nor wayward newspaper reporters, they tend to be magazine and book writers who have benefited enormously from both the legitimacy Wolfe's legacy has brought to literary nonfiction, and from the concurrent displacement of the novel as the most prestigious form of literary expression.
           This movement's achievements are more reportorial than literary, which is why the focus of The New New Journalism is on journalistic practice and method, as opposed to the theory or state of the genre. The days in which nonfiction writers test the limits of language and form have largely passed. The New Journalism was a truly avant garde movement that expanded journalism's rhetorical and literary scope by placing the author at the center of the story, channeling a character's thoughts, using nonstandard punctuation and exploding traditional narrative forms. That freedom to experiment has had a tremendous influence on many of the New New Journalists.
           Contrary to the New Journalists, this new generation experiments more with the way one gets the story. To that end, they've developed innovative immersion strategies (Ted Conover worked as a prison guard for Newjack, and lived as a hobo for Rolling Nowhere) and extended the time they've spent reporting (Adrian LeBlanc reported Random Family for nearly a decade; Leon Dash's Rosa Lee took over five years). While some are literary stylists of note (Richard Ben Cramer, Michael Lewis and Ron Rosenbaum, for instance), their most significant innovations have involved experiments with the way they reported the story, rather than the language they used to tell it.
           Finally, the New New Journalism is the literature of the every day. If Wolfe's outlandish scenarios and larger-than-life characters leap from the page, the New New Journalism goes in the opposite direction, drilling down into the bedrock of ordinary experience, exploring what Gay Talese calls "the fictional current that flows beneath the stream of reality." In this regard, writers such as John McPhee and Talese–prose poets of the quotidian–are its key figures in the prior generation. In Talese's quest to turn reporting on the ordinary into an art, we find an aspect of the New Journalism enterprise that Wolfe obscured in his manifesto. Both McPhee and Talese emphasize the importance of rigorous reporting on the events and characters of everyday life over turns of bravura in writing style. Reporting on the minutia of the ordinary–often over a period of years–has become their signature method.
           Talese draws the distinction between himself and Wolfe well. Unlike Wolfe, he prefers to write about failure. "It is a subject that intrigues me much more than success," he says. "Tom is interested in the new, the latest, the most current ... I'm more interested in what has held up for a long time and how it has done." And even when Talese does write about a subject as dramatic as the Mafia (as he did in Honor Thy Father), he shuns the story's most sensationalist dimension in favor of exploring the social and psychological reality of criminal life. Ronald Weber contrasts Wolfe and Talese differently. "If Wolfe could be placed on the literary end of the new nonfiction spectrum, Talese belonged on the journalistic end. If Talese was a reporter reaching for the levels of art, Wolfe was an artist who also happened to be a reporter."
           McPhee's influence has been twofold. First, a generation of literary journalists has taken his "Literature of Fact" course at Princeton (including Eric Schlosser and Richard Preston). Second, McPhee's influence on the New New Journalism can been seen in the catholic approach he takes toward subjects: anything–from geology and nuclear weapons to fishing and basketball–is fair game for the literary journalist, as long as it is prodigiously researched and painstakingly reported. As William L. Howarth writes, he has "stretched the artistic dimensions of reportage." The attraction of McPhee's work is the spirit with which he produces it, in his quietly defiant personal style, as much as the subjects he writes about. The informal, declaratory, almost deliberately inelegant tone one hears among many of the New New Journalists comes straight from McPhee. His authorial presence is the exact opposite of Wolfe's "hectoring narrator"; McPhee is rarely a character in his work, and if he does appear he is never in the foreground.
           The writers who appear in this book do not constitute a coherent group in any social or institutional manner. Some of them know each other, but most do not. They don't live in any one city or part of the country. They write for different magazines–primarily The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine and Rolling Stone–but most of them make their livings writing books. It is a far cry from the group of writers Wolfe describes in the Herald Tribune city room (Charles Portis, Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin), or at Harold Hayes' Esquire, and Clay Felker's New York Magazine.
           What they do share is a dedication to the craft of reporting, a conviction that by immersing themselves deeply into their subjects lives, often for prolonged periods of time, they can–much as Crane did before them–bridge the gap between their subjective perspective and the reality they are observing, that they can render that reality in a way that is both accurate and aesthetically pleasing. In their devotion to "close-to-the-skin" reporting–a journalistic version of Keat's "negative capability"–they are the "children" of McPhee and Talese.
           What this new breed represents is less a school of thought, or rule-defined movement, than a shorthand way of describing the reportorial sensibility behind an increasingly significant body of work. The list of writers I have focused on is neither exclusive nor complete–there are a dozen others I would have liked to include had I the time and space. Yet I chose these nineteen writers because each strikes me as representing a particular dimension of the New New Journalism.
           Much as it was in the 19th century, nonfiction today is also as prestigious–if not more so–than the novel. Ours is an age of nonfiction, "the de facto literature of our time," the critic Seymour Krim once called it. This is as true commercially as it is culturally. There is nothing quaint or marginal about works of literary journalism like Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, Michael Lewis's Moneyball, Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation–all of which have been enormous bestsellers. The New New Journalism is big business on a scale never before seen by serious literary journalism.
           With their muckraking and intensive reporting on social and cultural issues, The New New Journalists have revived the tradition of American literary journalism, raising it to a more popular and commercial level that neither its 19th or late 20th century predecessors ever imagined. The debates between "journalism" and "literature"–between "subjective" and "objective" reporting–weigh less heavily on this generation, freeing them to combine the best of both genres. Having done so without manifestos or public debates, the New New Journalism has assumed its rightful place in American literature.


2. The story of The New New Journalism

           I had neither studied nor taught journalism when I came to NYU. After a decade writing for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and many other periodicals, I had plenty of experiences to share with my students. But I was always acutely aware that these were simply my methods–not the best and (I hope) not the worst, but methods that were, for good or for ill, a reflection of me. Why should I assume they would work for anyone else? And if–as I believe–the only possessions a writer has are his talent and idiosyncrasies, was it even wise to recommend my hodge-podge of journalistic methods to my students?
           I resolved my moral quandary by beginning each semester by explaining that isn't important for a writer to use one particular method rather than another (although some are inherently superior). What is crucial, is that every writer have a method of some kind: routines to cling to when everything goes wrong, rules to follow when you're blocked or frustrated. After all, there are an infinite number of ways to organize one's writing life. I had my methods and knew other writers did, too. What were they? This book is my answer to that question.
           The book grew out of my classes, during which I would invite a journalist to discuss his work. What followed were conversations–extended interviews, really–on the process of writing: developing "beats," coming up with ideas, interviewing, research, writing, rewriting.
           The results were often fascinating–both for my class and for myself (and for our visiters, who all confessed they, too, had no idea how their colleagues operated). Ren Weschler described playing with children's blocks to organize his thoughts. Ron Rosenbaum explained why he (manually) typed and retyped each draft. Jane Kramer told of the elaborate meals she cooks while writing, her ideas simmering along with the ingredients. The arc of each conversation is roughly the same, and follows a hypothetical work from conception to publication. The goal of this project is to find a way of talking about writing–as opposed to the idea of writing–that is at once de-mystifying and edifying; to make an often baffling process more tangible and, perhaps, more manageable.

© Robert S. Boynton