reading english journalistic

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A publication printed and distributed at regular intervals containing news. Opinion, editorials. Comment columns, entertainment features, and other matter is ordinarily referred to as newspaper.

 

 

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Newspaper materials

Take an English newpaper and browse to get a general feeling of what is meant by special characteristics and discourse. There are distinct section in each newspaper, depending on its orientation. Here we will examine the major sections shared by most daily newspapers in English speaking countries.

Hardnews
Reports about accident,conflicts, crimes, announcements, new laws and regulations, discoveries, ete., which are the major prouct of a newspaper are refeered to as hard news. Rhey usually appear partially or completely on the front page, preceded by flagging headlines.

Editorial
In the "editorial" section the newspaper announces its position about some current event. This section usually appears on the inside pages.

Special topics
Most newspapers have sections specially devoted to such topics as sports, business, arts, agriculture, education, ete. In the "business" section, for example, they provide the news about current state of the market, stock exchange, production, commentaries, etc.

Sports
A whole section of most newspaper is devoted to"sports". Here again, one scan find the full coverage of current sport news, commentaries on winning and losing teams,stars,etc. e.g.

Notices and announcements
Thre is always one or more pages devoted to community notices about death, and commemoration ceremonies, etc.

Feature(soft news)
Feature" is another section which presents stories prepared by reporters who try ti find topcs which attract attention. Their stories may include a wide range of topics from the private life of a famous person, the cost of launching a space shuttle,collecting peoples" views on a controversial issue, to a visit to an unknown spot in the heart of an Afrian jugle. Features are also referred to as soft news.

Caricature
A few caricatures ridiculing current social or political controversial issues are also common in most newspapers.

Advertisement
And advertisement, of course, more than 60% of all the space in most western newspapers is taken by advertisement. Some advertisements take full newpaper pages, others go for less space. After all, it s the advertisement portion of the newspaper which keeps it running.

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Hardnews

Headline

The headline is placed above the article and is printed in large bold typeset to attract the reader’s attention. It densely summarizes and highlights the content of the article. It contains enough signals to make effective guesses about the most important information of the text. Place is sometimes specified in headline, but never time.

Lead
The first sentence (paragraph) of the news article is referred to as the lead and contains the essential points of the story. The headline is ordinarily an abstraction of the lead, while the lead itself is usually an abstraction of the article. the lead’s main function, however, is starting the story itself by as many colorful details from the body of the story as possible.

Orientation
In news stories, as in personal narrative, orientation sets the scene: who are the actors, where and when did the events take place, what is the initial situation? In other words who, what, when, where and how are the basic facts which concentrate at the beginning of a story, but may be expanded future down.
News stories that are receved from international agencies are datelined at the top for time and place origin, and thus the deictic here and today used in the lead paragraph become meaningful. The dateline specifies the location from which the journalist sent the story to the news agency. The dateline is placed below the headline and above the lead.

Evaluation
As in personal narratives, evaluation is the means by which the significance of a news story is established. Most of evaluation is centered in the lead paragraph.
Briefly, evaluation in the news relates to the aspects being focused to make it newsworthy.

Action
Unlike in a personal narrative, where the sequence of events as they occurred is important, news stories are seldom told in chronological order. The principle here is to place the result before the action which caused it.

Attribution
Attribution serves an important function in the telling of news stories. It reminds the reader that the story originated with certain persons and organizations; there was a reliable source of information.

Personalization
Personalization is a news value in its own right. Journalists structure their leads and headlines in a way to carry a news actor first. Those who get in the news are either the valued elite—political figures, professional or public figures, sports persons, celebrities—as well as victims of crimes, accidents or disasters.

Bias
News bias can be expressed in syntactic structures of sentences, such as the use of active or passive constructions, which allow the journalist to express or suppress the agent of news acts from subject position
Hence, when we read the news, we are raely concerned about the meaning of isolated words or sentences, but about the meaning of larger fragments of text or about the whole texts.