Reporting and Editing Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The keyed answer is story telling. Writers for the media have taken up narrative techniques, and presenting news, advertisements and features as stories is the common method because stories hold attention.

Convolution means a twisted, complicated form, deconstruction is a method of analysis and not of writing, and over-dramatisation is a fault rather than a technique that writers have adopted.

Narrative forms, such as features, soap operas and docudramas, work because people remember a story better than a list of facts, which is why media writers use them.

Answer: A

The correct matches are a-4, b-3, c-2, d-1. The circulation war is linked with Joseph Pulitzer (the rivalry with Hearst), cheque-book journalism is money paid to the source, paid news is money given to journalists, and a column is linked with Pothen Joseph, the Indian columnist. The code is 4 3 2 1, option A.

Options B, C and D pair paid news with the source, or the column with Pulitzer, which is wrong.

Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's Journal fought a circulation war in the 1890s that gave rise to yellow journalism, which is the link the list makes.

Answer: B

Editing in newspapers means the removal of fog in writing. Fog here is the haze of padding, jargon, vague words and tangled sentences that comes between the writer and the reader, and the editor's task is to clear it so that the meaning is plain and the copy fits the space. Articles, atmosphere and treatment are not things an editor strips out in this sense: an article is the item itself, atmosphere is a quality of writing, and treatment is how a subject is handled. Hence fog.

Answer: A

The combination of a sound bite and a stand-up is a package.

A package is a complete recorded report in television news in which the reporter's own voice track is combined with pictures, sound bites from the people involved and usually a stand-up of the reporter at the scene.

Talking heads are shots of people speaking to the camera. A voice-over is narration read over pictures without a stand-up or sound bites, and supers are text lines laid over the picture, so none of them combines the two named elements.

Answer: D

The readability tests, the Fog Index and the Reading Ease score, were first employed by news agencies.

Robert Gunning's Fog Index and Rudolf Flesch's Reading Ease formula were worked out in the 1940s and 1950s in the context of making news copy easier to read, and were used for wire copy by agencies such as the Associated Press, before spreading to newspapers.

Syndicates and television networks were not where these formulas were first employed. Newspapers took them up afterwards, so D is the key.

Answer: C

Television news writing these days includes gender-neutral words.

Modern newsroom style guides ask writers to use neutral terms such as 'chairperson' or 'police officer', in place of gendered ones, together with short sentences and plain words that the viewer can follow at one hearing.

Hyperboles, non-sequiturs and uncommon abbreviations work against the clear and accurate language that broadcast style asks for, since a listener cannot go back over what was said.

Answer: C

The official key gives C: A is true and R is false.

Many commentators hold that editing, in the sense of careful checking, cutting and correcting of copy, has declined in print journalism, with smaller desks and the pressure of deadlines (A).

The reason says that language precision is not a qualification for recruitment in newspapers. That is too sweeping to be true, since command of language is still a basic requirement for journalists, so R is false. A and B would accept R, and D would reject A.

Answer: A

The correct matching is a-2, b-1, c-4, d-3.

A banner is a headline running across the top of a page, so it goes with 'Headlines'. Sedition is matched with the Emergency in the key, the period when the press faced prosecution and curbs. The Berliner is a newspaper format, midway in size between broadsheet and tabloid. Swadesamitran, the Tamil newspaper founded in 1882, was a voice of the independence movement.

The other codes give the format to the wrong item, such as taking Berliner for a headline.

Answer: A

In terms of public awareness, news has the status of dominant discourse, the account of events that most people share and take as the picture of reality. Conflict value, unintended exchange and limited judgement are not statuses given to news by the key, so the first option is correct. The term comes from the study of discourse and describes news that shapes the way most people understand an event.

Answer: A

A publication that is half the size of a broadsheet is a tabloid. A digest is a small magazine format, a single dummy is a single-page layout form and a double dummy a two-page form, so none of those names the half-size newspaper. The size is the standard way to tell newspaper formats apart, which is what the question tests.