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Helen Thomas
On Writing
TRADITIONAL NEWS WRITING STYLE
That's it, in journalism, telling what happened. And frankly, I don't like the trend in journalism today, where you have to find out what happened in the eighteenth paragraph, you know, these feature leads and so forth. I really do like the hard news story that tells you everything almost in the first paragraph. I think that's old-fashioned, but I still like it.
We still have that basic performance, and if you don't have it, your editor will put it that way.
Well, I think the inverted pyramid is still very, very important for news agencies. I mean, we are not taking a feature-y approach, or if we are I think that our editors will soon put us on the right road again. Simply because we're writing news, and we want people to catch it in a hurry, and we have to write now only 300 words, or 400 words to tell the story, whereas before we could write 800 words. So it's a different world, it's very, very important, that's what hard news is all about.
You're not writing a mystery story, you're not writing something like a whodunit, you're trying to tell people right off, I really want the news up there. I know it's become passé really, but mainly because they think that only TV and radio are now doing the hard news fast, and so forth. But, and that newspapers should take a more feature-y approach, you can tell it as you roll along. Well, I don't believe in that.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TV AND PRINT
Well...a TV reporter, they can work, I've seen them work. And they are hard workers, and they're great reporters. They can work 12 hours to get on the air for a minute or a minute and a half on the nightly news, and that's nirvana for them. I mean, that's the top of the mark, this is what they struggle for, to get on the air. And especially on the prime-time news, 6:30, 7:00 at night. So that's the difference. We're writing all the time. We're on the wire, constantly. And I think we have a more...more fun for us. We know the story's going out. Some of it's going to land somewhere, maybe in Thailand, but nevertheless...(laughs)
Newspapers are becoming very thin, we've become a country, almost unfortunately, I really regret this, a one-newspaper town. Competition is our lifeblood. It really makes the system go. And it's tragic to see so little competition in the newspapering field anymore. To see a two-newspaper town is to really see a rarity, and usually it has a joint ownership, so it's become...
We're limited to 400 words. But except for a big story, where it's really breaking, then you can go for broke. But no, we've all become headline writers, in a sense.
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