Saturday, January 7, 2012

Newspapers and Television News

There are so many exciting ways in which you can adapt a newspaper or television news style for retelling stories in new ways. One of the best things about news reporting is that this style allows you to bring different voices into the story as the reporters interview different people who have important information to share, such as eyewitnesses to the events, experts, and members of the public who might want to voice their reactions.

To get started, you might want to look through these Storybooks done in the news reporting style and see what features grab your attention!

News reporting style. If you decide to go with a newspaper format, you might want to look the Wikipedia article about News Style. It gives a good, detailed overview of the characteristic features of news reporting, such as the headline, byline, lead, and so on. You might enjoy this fun newspaper clipping generator where you can put your headline and story in order to generate a custom graphic image: Newspaper Clipping Generator.

Newspapers have more than news. Remember also that a newspaper can contain lots of different types of material in addition to news reporting, so you might want to include different kinds of stories in your Storybook. Instead of doing all four stories as news reporting, you could include feature articles, a "Dear Abby" type of column, an editorial, etc., finding just the right newspaper feature to fit each story that you want to tell.

Television news style. Television news also has its typical features, with the news anchor, the remote reporter, etc. Just to get a feel for how television news works, sit down and watch a news broadcast, taking notes as you look for stylistic features that you think would work well for your project!

Here's a screenshot of a Storybook, Ganges Gazette, which uses a multicolumn layout (columns are easy in Google Sites) in order to simulate the multicolumn layout of a newspaper: