Digital News Production Unit- Workshop.

I have recently attended a workshop for Digital News Production, with the point being to improve the way I see journalism and also learn some tricks of the trade in terms of writing articles and such for news. Now, in the past I have written pieces of work and have been highly praised because of my ability to write fluently and creatively. I have never written journalism pieces before however.
Therefore it came as a shock to me to discover how different the styles of writing are for journalistic writing.

At the start of the day we watched a short film in which a presenter gave us tips on how to write the perfect article. At one point the presenter said that using simple one syllable words and getting straight to the point was a very useful tool when writing an article, and referenced Winston Churchill's famous speech:



I found this short film to be very useful, and learnt a lot of techniques that I had never even heard of before, such as trying to limit each sentence to 16 words or less. I thought I had clear knowledge about how to write, and as I mentioned it was very surprising to learn how different journalistic writing is to my own brand of creative writing.
It was a very humbling experience,

Afterwards, we were set the task of being given a press release on a random subject and writing a report on it. I had some difficulty with this, as I was still getting to terms with this new style of writing, but I learnt quickly that the words on the press release could not possibly be taken as gospel.
If we were to follow the facts, figures and statements given in the press-release and only report on them, we would be nothing more than advertisers for the people that wrote the press release.
Therefore it was an important process to use online sources to research figures and find new quotes and such and develop the release into a fully fledged story, complete with arguments and "to the contraries."
I am looking forward to repeating this process in the future with whatever stories we decide to settle with for our news production unit and our eventual report.