Class Blog


Comm200 Learns Leads & Canvases Campus-328

By Will Noel

Thursday morning 30 AU students canvassed campus looking for curiosities and conflicts for an upcoming assignment…

The previous lines are an example of how to correctly format articles.

The first line is the date.

The second line is called the Slug. It is a few words that act as an abstract for the article. It often includes basic information about the article (including word count and news cycle).

Third is the by line.

Finally the article starts with a lead (a.k.a. lede). A quick informative line that is also eye-catching. Leads can describe the 5 W’s (who, what, where, when, why), but do not give away the entire story. Harrower offers a small review in creating strong leads on pg. 63.

After the lead, most articles have a summation, called the nut graf. This paragraph is followed by different grafs. The 3rd graf is often a quote. The 4th graf is usually background. However there is no concrete rule (just proven methods).

Using these basic rules creating an article or finding a story can be as easy as finding a location on campus and observing what is happening. Finding primary sources (i.e. people to interview) is a must in these situations.

When you interview a person it is important to quote them exactly, and take good notes. Objectivity comes from good research and factual writing.

These concepts were all covered in Comm200 on September 3, 2009.



There are no comments on this post.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo



Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: