Reporting and Editing Questions and Answers

Answer: C

It is an example of a backgrounder.

A backgrounder is a story written soon after a news event to give readers the context they need to understand it: the history of the issue, the laws involved and the arguments on each side. An analysis of the death penalty published just after a death sentence uses the news as a peg to explain the wider issue.

An in-depth story investigates a subject at length, a trend story reports a pattern emerging over time, and a theme story builds around a general theme, rather than explaining the background to a specific news event.

Answer: D

Such an essay is a rhetorical analysis.

Rhetorical analysis takes a non-fiction text, such as a speech, an editorial or an advertisement, breaks it into its parts (appeals to ethos, pathos and logos, structure, style, audience, purpose) and explains how those parts work together to persuade, entertain or inform.

Discourse analysis studies language in use and the social meanings it carries, rather than how one text achieves its effect. Ethnographic content analysis is a qualitative way of studying documents, moving between data and concepts. Narrative analysis looks at how stories are structured and told.

Answer: B

The term was first used during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

For the 2003 invasion the US Department of Defense placed several hundred reporters inside military units, where they lived, travelled and moved with the troops under agreed ground rules. The arrangement and the term 'embedded journalists' (embeds) date from that war, and it raised questions about how independent such reporting could be.

Correspondents had accompanied armies earlier, in the First and Second World Wars and even the American Revolution, but they were called war correspondents. The word 'embedded' was not applied to them at the time.

Answer: B

The timeliness value is in a story that stresses events that occurred today or yesterday.

Timeliness (printed 'timeliner') is the news value of recency: news is about what has just happened, and the fresher the event, the stronger its claim to space. A daily paper therefore stresses events of the past day or so.

Events of the last month are too old to be news on timeliness alone. The other two options measure when the story was written or read, not when the event happened, which is what timeliness concerns, so a story written in the last six hours about an old event has no claim to it.

Answer: C

Proximity applies when a news organisation carries a murder story because it was committed locally.

Proximity is the news value of nearness. Readers care more about events close to them, geographically, and sometimes culturally or emotionally, so a local murder is more newsworthy to a local paper than a similar one far away.

The other options name different news values. A murder chosen because it was unusual reflects novelty (oddity); one chosen because it happened today reflects timeliness; and one chosen because it involved a well-known person reflects prominence.

Answer: B

A story is biased when a reporter relies on one source, especially in a controversy.

In a dispute each side has its own version of events. A story built on only one of them presents that side's account as the truth, and leaves out the other side, which is the definition of a one-sided or biased story. Fairness requires seeking out and representing all the parties.

Relying on multiple sources is the remedy for bias, not its cause. Writing on a subject one knows well is expertise, and writing about people one has known for some time raises a possible conflict of interest but does not by itself make the story biased.

Answer: D

The practice is to withhold the name of the victim but publish the name of the suspect.

News organisations protect the identity of rape survivors because of the stigma and further harm that publicity can bring. In India this is also the law: Section 228A of the Indian Penal Code made it an offence to print or publish the name or any matter that may make known the identity of a rape victim. The person accused, on the other hand, is normally named, as in any other criminal case.

Publishing the victim's name, in either the second or third option, breaks that rule, and withholding both names is not the usual practice for the suspect.

Answer: A

It is called the nut graph (nut graf).

In a feature-style or delayed-lead story, the nut graph comes after the introductory anecdote or scene and states in a nutshell what the story is about and why it matters to the reader, hence its other name, the 'so what' paragraph.

'No bill' is a legal term for a grand jury's refusal to indict. 'Open record' refers to public records that anyone may inspect under freedom-of-information laws. Body copy is the main text of a story or an advertisement as a whole, not the particular paragraph that explains its significance.

Answer: D

Such words are used as transitions.

Words and phrases like meanwhile, therefore, also and but link one sentence or paragraph to the next and show the relationship between ideas: time, cause, addition or contrast. In news writing they keep a story flowing smoothly from one fact to the next.

They do not break paragraphs, they are not the body copy itself (the main text of a story or advertisement), and they are not themes, which are the central ideas of a story.

Answer: B

Hard news is about serious topics and recent events, and soft news about human interest stories.

Hard news covers timely, consequential events such as politics, crime, the economy and disasters, reported quickly in an inverted-pyramid style. Soft news covers features, lifestyle, entertainment and human-interest pieces, where timeliness matters less and the writing can be more leisurely.

The difference is one of subject and urgency, not of length or grammatical complexity, and hard news is not defined as 'convoluted' topics.