Reporting on news journalism — My Experience
Most stories in the media are fiction, even the non-fiction ones.
My assignment demanded of us to research a news story and re-write it, making sure it was better, more informative and punchy. Sounds like an easy task in theory, but our total lack of experience meant we were met with obstacles we didn’t even know existed.
These days, most of us read a headline as if that’s all we need. Be it, ‘politician is racist on Twitter’, or ‘10 ways to cheat your way out of a speeding ticket’, they’re all click-bait rubbish. We know this, but it’s not just the tabloids that love to capitalise on our thirst for a good bit of gossip.
Our group spent ages researching more contextual information in order to give the reader more of an insight into why our chosen story is so important, and why people should care about it. And 3 days into our work, we thought we’d done it. We focused on a story that began in Bournemouth but gained national traction when a Dorset Councillor caused controversy making comments that many deemed to be ‘Islamophobic’. We researched more into why exactly were her comments controversial, and why they were so important within a national context, especially in the multicultural society we live in.
However, it wasn’t until we started delving deeper into stories around islamophobia and other similar incidents that we found a whole other side to the story that seemed to have been completely overlooked by national newspapers, even the BBC. It turns out that the Councillor in question had responded to the comments suggesting the banning of mosques saying they were taken “out of context” and in actual fact were made as an ironic joke. The Dorset Councillor also suggested that she was very much opposed to the idea of closing mosques and had a ‘libertarian outlook’.
In normal circumstances you would view Dunlop’s explanation as fuelling a counternarrative, and hitting national headlines just as much as the original article. But it was surprising to see these responses were just completely overlooked in many stories we looked at, when they were written after this response was published in the Daily Echo.
At the time my group and I frantically rushed to change our angle because in theory, the story was completely worthless once we’d found out that the ‘Islamophobic’ councillor actually made an ‘ironic’ joke that backfired. And this is exactly what we decided to focus on, instead looking at the wider issue of Islamophobia within the conservative party.
It is fascinating to see that even broadsheets and local newspapers, in which we view as factual and fail to give a second thought to can equally twist stories and pick angles to suit their audience and pick a more enticing headline. Whilst in this country we are geared to believe that the tabloid press is the shame of England, we found in this small project that in actual fact, all newspaper want to sell as many copies as they can, and so any sort of reporting must catch the readers eye, and have somewhat of a shock value to them, or be framed negatively, as this is what people love to read.
Newspapers may have different standards but, don’t forget, they all want your money.
