Journalistic Writing (Jun. 17th)

Much to everyone's surprise, yesterday's class was abruptly canceled so what I had prepared to share with the team was shared today. My role in the group is to tweak the website to ameliorate its readability, write the group's "about us" page, and our aim for the home page. Organizing the website was fun but simultaneously challenging. Whenever I see a website online, copy and paste the exact same sentences for several sections of the website, I just inherently assume that they were lazy. So, in order to not portray such an attitude for our group, I aimed to put different information on every tab, and omit any overlapping whatsoever(unless repetition is needed to emphasize imperative elements). This process took a lot of time, contemplating, and moving things around, but looking at the outcome, it was definitely worth it. I congested what I learned from the past three years with Mr.Paterson, making sure I did not have any underlined words and all fonts were unified. Next, I need to film my short video introducing myself and hooking the viewers on my topic. With the aim of engaging and grabbing people's attention, I figured I need adequate information to confidently/entertainingly film a video. 

During today's class, since it was predominantly a free period to work in groups, I asked copious questions to Mr.Paterson, regarding how to write in a journalistic way. He suggested first elucidate on the 5W's and 1H. It had never come to my attention, but when reading an article on the news, after a few sentences in, the overall background is already comprehensible, and the essential facts have been established.  While talking to Mr.Paterson, his wide range of knowledge and list of stories stored in his mind was absolutely mind-blowing. I researched hours just to find a scoop on china's illegal usage of food additives, yet Mr.Paterson knew so many more. This relates to what he mentioned at the beginning, considering how to effectively acquire information via Twitter. I had a realization that I should not always be lazy and opt for the most convenient source of media, which in my case is staring daggers at one TV channel, every morning.  

For the entirety of my writing journey, I had never written in a news reporting format, so everything was unraveled from there forth. Therefore I had copious questions since my only preliminary methods were based on academic writing. My most significant question today was why news reports don't have references. I have never seen a news article with in-text citations or a bibliography. For reading the news for decades now, it shocked me that I had not even realized it to this day. What Mr.Paterson explained was the company or organization (of news reporters) is confirming that their news is reliable regardless of having proper citations or not. I still wonder, take for example, the journalists were not able to see the case with their own eyes (because it was not preplanned). In such cases, do they research the facts and write it as if they saw it themselves? In the past, I have seen newspapers interviewing experts of a certain field or the voices of citizens (preferably both sides although that does not always happen). I chose my topic about the "profit-hungry industry" in China economically motivated for food fraud, affecting innumerable people. With prior experience literally living in Beijing, China, and witnessing people struggling with their purchase decisions, I plan to interview my Chinese teacher living at the forefront of dilemmas in China. 

Notes:

finding people who are credible on Twitter, check if they are not working for the mainstream media, 

not subject to the five filters, 

interview some people. expert in the field. a stake or interest in the story. 

Writing tools. (readability for target)

Biases creep in, gold standard.