(You might have heard echoes of this one in popular discussion of the recent rioting in England.). Just like you can write pages about pulling a trigger, you can write a whole paragraph about one serve in a tennis match. Of course, since Franklin’s day, the velocity and volume of information have increased by orders of magnitude. One way or another, it makes for dramatic writing! Today, he says, news is more of a process than a product. The prolongation of the war in Vietnam has been attributed to this phenomenon. The questions were designed to test those conjectures. I appreciate it. , I’ve read a lot of Fredrick Forsythe’s books. But the reader deserves to know when fiction is the vehicle for the purported truth. Now, I’d like to empower you to find your voice, share your ideas and inspire your audience. In that year, the portion of gross domestic product spent on food manufacturing, i.e. He describes a lot of action and concrete details. I have to agree, that it is about finding just the right balance in between too long and too short. Indeed, the value of a medium for advertisers was judged by what ad salesmen called CPM, which stands for cost per thousand consumers reached. The emphasis is on accuracy and comprehensiveness in reporting, and on clarity and precision in writing. This style of writing is an appropriate mode of writing for technical communication, but can also be used in nontechnical situations. We guide our clients through the process of OQM certification, OHS program development, proposal writing, and more. Harvard taught me to use one of those languages, called DATA-TEXT, written at Harvard for the IBM 7090. But I’m no tennis expert. Citizens can offer Twitter updates from a scene, and reporters can look for patterns a I told my friend Alvin Shuster, who reported from Europe for The New York Times, “They want me to give the Hedy Lamarr Lecture.” He was surprised. Is it possible for us to find ways to merge these two strategies and tell stories about the data that are grounded in verifiable theory? Now extend this trend toward specialization to the present day, and what do you find? We needed some hypotheses. I appreciate the book resources, too. The most successful technology forecasts, as Ithiel Pool found, have been those that combined study of the technical possibilities with market analysis. Did you become curious whether the serve would go in or out? We write proposals that win and documents that impress. And, today, trying to find patterns in the current confusion in my own country, I see strange things happening to democracy. Once again, we might be able to send a few messages to many people, a reversal of the de-massification of the media. That falsified the riff-raff theory. Thank you for stopping by to leave a comment. In “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” I compared the digital age to the development of agriculture. It won’t be often that the two skills, analysis and narrative, can be combined in one reporter, so we’ll need more team reporting and editors capable of recruiting and managing the necessary talent. I was searching for a “click to tweet” for the “write fast stuff slow and slow stuff fast.” Need to embed that one in my brain. For decades, as a precision journalist I considered narrative journalists my natural enemies. With technology making so many more facts available today, it argued six decades ago, finding the truth about them is both more difficult and more important. What they have in common is recognition that raw data require structure to be made coherent. It will help students develop news writing skills across a broad range of topics for a variety of delivery platforms appropriate to both traditional and new journalism paradigms. In essence, all the other new journalists push reporting toward art. ‘New Journalism’ Meets ‘Precision Journalism’, In 1974, the year that Walter Lippmann died, Everette E. Dennis and William L. Rivers published a book titled “Other Voices.” It catalogued what their subtitle called “The New Journalism in America.” They labeled one of their categories “the new nonfiction.” Today it is known as “narrative journalism” or “creative nonfiction.” In recognition that it has become a mainstream technique, Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation ran a well-attended annual conference on narrative journalism from 2001 to 2009. We found that residents who were raised in the north were more likely to riot than their neighbors from the South. Precision Journalism: A Reporter's Introduction to Social Science Methods. Time! Good to see you here! Conventional wisdom, as expressed by editorial writers and social scientists offered several: At the Free Press, we hired consultants from the University of Michigan and organized a sample survey of households in the riot area, using personal interviews. This genre is often called “precision journalism,” a term coined by Dennis. Beat reporting, libel law, and ethical practices will also be addressed. I have read Ithiel de Sola Pool’s book “Forecasting the Telephone” in which he looked at the many different consequences that experts were foreseeing when the telephone was in its early adoption stage, from 1876 to 1940. For example one made in 1906 held that the telephone would facilitate the central management of political organizations and campaigns. “Nobody,” he kidded, “wants to hear an 80-year-old lecturer not named Einstein.”, But being old has its advantages. But note how the original version allows you to picture how Ashe stands, how he tosses the ball up and how he serves at a furious speed. Makes sense. In the summer of 1967, Knight Newspapers sent me to help the Detroit Free Press and its overworked staff cover an inner-city race riot. Persuasive copy educates the reader, and the details in the copy boost the credibility of the seller. The ROTC building was then, and is now, at the other end of the campus. In 1980, a Washington Post reporter, Janet Cooke, wrote a heartbreaking narrative piece about a 13-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy. The more I learned about the backstory—about how the players grew up, their family, their training, their characters, and the psychology of the game—the more fascinating the match becomes to me, as a reader. I am a graduate of Kansas State University. Precision journalists push it toward science.”. Yes, that would be an esoteric specialty. But I don’t think it will be that easy. “What was in that building,” he asked the students. Thank you for your lovely comment, Jeff. When sales copy is too brief, it sounds hyped up—as if it’s written by a marketer who doesn’t really know what she’s talking about. I call this “ease of use,” and it is facilitated through well-crafted articles, multi-media offerings, and web architecture. Before we think about that possibility, let’s consider a little history. Fifteen-forty. You need to hook the reader from the beginning else he will quickly move to something more exciting. The need for systems that synthesize and process data into shared knowledge will, I predict, become obvious. I also like the way McPhee describes the psychology of the game in his book. The impact of precise writing on drama is oft-misunderstood. That book was updated in 1978 but has been out print for several years. Greater analytic and narrative skills will be needed. It held that rioters came from the bottom of the social-economic scale and were simply incapable of any other means of getting ahead. Scholars today have different interpretations of what technology is doing to journalism, and I cannot be certain that any of them are wrong. I made that last sentence bold. The arsonist was an emotionally disturbed undergraduate whose grievance had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam. Philip Meyer's work in precision journalism established a new and ongoing trend-the use by reporters of social science research techniques to increase the depth and accuracy of major stories. Learn more about books and courses, I never saw myself as a writer, but in my early forties, I learned how to write and discovered the joy of writing. Bravo! Image by David Brewer released via Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. 4:”. For instance, Apple could have written: The iPhone XS screen shows images in a more natural tone. Cooke lost her job, and the prize was withdrawn. If the ball were allowed to drop, it would, in Ashe’s words, “make a parabola and drop to the grass three feet in front of the baseline.” He has practiced tossing a tennis ball just so thousands of times. That is why it is not so wild a dream that evidence-based journalism, incorporating precision with narrative, could fill a need for trustworthy interpretation and selection of the relevant truth from the … Other observers have focused on interactivity as the main value created by new technology. The precise yet elaborate description built the tension up so masterfully that I felt I was right there…documenting the process. I like watching tennis and I played it a few times, but my hand-eye coordination is pretty useless . We want lower taxes and more services. He is exaggerating quite a bit, if you ask me, just for dramatic effect ‘He is falling.’, I’m not sure that’s an exaggeration because it does look like a falling movement until the player steps forward. It means asking a question of nature in a way that you will not be fooled by the answer. Their jointly written story combined quantitative analysis with human interest reporting, and it showed vividly how the combination of relaxed lending standards and inflated home prices caused the crisis. Is this a temporary aberration or a permanent consequence of the technology? In 1967, there was no shortage of it. They were crude. That is why it is not so wild a dream that evidence-based journalism, incorporating precision with narrative, could fill a need for trustworthy interpretation and selection of the relevant truth from the eternal data stream. By definition, representative democracy is a deliberative process. We worried less about getting enough to eat and started thinking about vitamin content, fiber, taste, texture, all sorts of variables. Precision writing is a style of written communication whose primary objective is to convey information. Unprocessed data is indistinguishable from noise. Such a development might save us from further fragmentation of the information marketplace. Months later, after Kennedy had been killed, Breslin went back to Kansas State as an invited speaker. Resolving those conflicts requires deliberation, and that’s what a legislative body is for. That’s only 7 words—the actual first paragraph, as above, contains 165 words. I picked that up from TV. The toss is high and forward. I appreciate your lovely comment. As McPhee writes in his book “Draft No. Right down the middle. The successful entrepreneurs will analyze the market need and then work backward from that, building a system to meet a verified need, not an imagined need. Yes, it’s about finding the right balance, and choosing what to leave in and what to leave out. Breslin covered a portion of Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president and was with him when he spoke to students in the field house at Kansas State University. Interviews, like all things writing related, are both an art and a science, and it involves both connecting with people at a personal level and asking questions that elicit information, sometimes information they don’t particularly want you to know. They drew a probability sample of about 400 foreclosure filings in each of three widely separated metropolitan areas, Seattle, Baltimore and Phoenix. Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me, How vivid language makes your ideas unforgettable, How to write descriptively, with oodles of personality, Decide where you want to slow down the pace of your story by sketching a vivid scene, Where possible use numbers—they give an impression of factual knowledge. Take on any writing project with gusto. Ha yes, the gazillion novels of James Patterson. My Skillset As a mutlipotentialite, I have skills in many areas: writing, speaking, debating, designing, drawing, coding, collecting and analyzing data, and solving interdisciplinary problems. The patterns will not always be obvious. It’s the Zoom-In-Zoom-Out technique: He zooms in on a specific exchange of strokes in the match, then zooms out to profile the players. JRN 102. That’s what I find so fascinating about writing. Is this a temporary aberration or a permanent structural barrier that will change the way democracy works? Age allows us to view things from different perspectives. Journalism education also benefits students going into law, politics, consulting, health education, business, and environmental and sports studies and many other fields that require information gathering, precision writing and visual communication skills. Let’s get started. This is the most minute and specialized portion of what Jarvis called “the never-ending stream.”. The sentence “The dog jumped up on the boy” is a simple statement. Use sensory details to make your descriptions more vivid. Actually it reminds me of this running technique I once tried: “The Pose Method of Running technique consists of three elements: Pose – Fall – Pull and it accepts gravity as the primary force for forward movement instead of muscular effort.”. The genre first started to appear in the 1960s. I was surprised how fascinating it is to read about one tennis match. The ROTC had stored its rifles in Nichols Gym until 1942 when the Military Science Department got its own building. This doesn’t just work in sports journalism. I love that quote from Lee Child, too. That means, as a public, we have fewer common experiences that build common values. Quantitative methods, once an exotic subset, were being enabled by the rapid drop in the price of computing power and the development of higher-level statistical languages. In 1922, he published “Public Opinion,” a classic still in print today. Yes, the parabola … that’s so true. The defense of those who make news too much like fiction is that they are conveying “a higher truth.” Indeed, fiction will do that. “He is falling” is exactly how it feels in the weight transfer of hitting a good serve. For example, Gail Sheehy wrote an article for New York magazine in 1973 that described in great detail the sexual and financial escapades of a prostitute in New York who was called “Redpants.” Then the Wall Street Journal revealed that there was no “Redpants.” Sheehy had used a composite of several different prostitutes to provide the dramatic compression needed to give her story the pace and depth of fiction. He walked across the campus with a group of students who were still talking about Kennedy. That running technique sounds complicated! It was the underlying structure that we were worried about in our Detroit post-riot coverage. I like how you’ve been looking at writing lately from different perspectives, to accomplish different purposes. Precision Writing Ltd. is a corporate communications company offering services in communications strategy, professional writing services, public relations, and marketing. 3 visual thinking tips for writers How vivid language makes your ideas unforgettable How to write descriptively, with oodles of personality. But I don’t agree writing should always be brief. processing, began to exceed the amount spent on farming. Shade in the Skid Row neighborhood, Downtown Los Angeles. You also get an initial impression of Ashes’ physical powers: 155 pounds, 6 ft, relatively frail. 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