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SESSION B. 2 (a) : EXERCISE.
 
SPINNING THE NEWS
 
Break into two groups
 
Group (1) Will take existing Faxed Press Releases and edit some of them so as to extract the core information, remove the spin and write up a community radio announcement that will serve the information needs of local people.

Group (2) will take an event of their choosing (a protest march, a seminar or a newly published report) and devise a Press Release that meets the criteria of professional journalists and thus ensure that it will be broadcast with the minimum of distortion.
 
Both groups should ensure that their piece incorporates as many of the following components as possible;
 
Frequency: Those events, which become news, will have the same frequency as the medium you send it to. For example, television or radio news is a daily event, so, a polluted river and a fish kill will last for a day's news, whereas, related environmental efforts spread over several months won't constitute news.

Proximity: National broadcasters deal, in the main with events of national interest. They also consider events within the national border as being more important than anywhere else. A typhoon killing 50 people in Bangladesh won't rate as high as two car deaths on the M50.
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Threshold: The size of an event is another criteria. A march, which guarantees several thousand, will get television cameras there.
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Negativity: News takes the normal for granted. Long-term, developmental events are much less likely to feature as news than a catastrophe. Dissidence, disorder, or the threat of it, will assist news coverage.
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Unexpectedness: Journalists cannot go on writing about the same thing. Events such as unemployment and third world debt need a new 'twist', if they are to make it into news bulletins.
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Composition: If the editor's sense of the balance of the whole bulletin suggests that with so many foreign stories, a 'home' story is required, some lucky local event will be juxtaposed.
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Personalisation: Human interest always sells. Thus, The nurses strike may be featured on the news by 'Baby X' not getting the operation it needs.
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Narrativisation: News is often a matter of fitting unknown facts to known narratives. Journalists like to do this and often appreciate an apposite Press Release that does it for them. 
 
Both groups will reconvene and discuss.

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