Tuesday 9th

Today 'Ghost Dave' came to talk to us again. He was explaining the different things we could put in the newspaper and what they are. This is basically what he said, but i went into more detail.

For any new article, you need to decide if it is relevant, will people care and WHO is likely to care. If you put an article about the financial distress of some company on the front page if the Sun, you aren't going to sell that many copies. You need to know your audience and relate any articles included to what they would want to read.

You should also only write about what you can get more information on. There's no point making an article about something that you read on Wikipedia or heard from your mate down the pub. If you can find it that easily, so can anyone else. You need to have the inside scoop. People will read newspapers to find out things they otherwise might not know, not because they prefer it to Wikipedia.

For research, Wikipedia is a really useful tool, providing you can verify any facts that you find on there. There's no point in using facts that have been made up, but there's no point disregarding Wikipedia simply because anyone can edit it. Try and find an expert in the field you are writing about and ask them their opinions. How things actually work, what's actually going on instead of what someone else has heard.

You need a fresh angle on a story if it has been done before. This angle very much depends on the style of the newspaper. For example, a newspaper like the Independant is going to have a very different take on any given event than a newspaper such as, say, The Sun. A good example of this is Michael Jacksons death. If you search that on the Sun's website, you get very different articles than you do from searching it the the Independant's website. The Sun seems very more about gossip and what could have happened and is made from rumours and guesswork, apparently. The Independant's angle was more "This happened, this happened. A film is coming out" It's very to-the-point, and skips over the main issue, as it's not their style.

The tone of the paper is important, too because is changes how the product feels. You can have news, opinion pieces, features, interviews and advertorial thigns in a newspaper. An opinion piece, as the name suggests is very biased. Think Charlie Brooker's Screen Burn column for the Guardian or David Mitchell's weekly column for the Observer. The feature could be about the history of a specific product, how to do something and just a main feature of the paper. Interviews can be done in two basic styles, either introducing the interviewee and basically saying what he/she has done and said, or in a Q&A format.