Article Writing: News Reporter or Columnist
I never thought I’d ever carry the title of News Reporter nor did I ever have the desire to. I write articles, but as anyone who has ever read my work can tell you, my articles are personal experience or opinion-based articles. Even when I write help or research articles, my opinion is there, pretty plain to see. That’s just the way I write—my style.
The first article I sold to a newspaper was a personal experience article and the editor as well as the owner loved it—loved it enough to offer me a job writing feature articles. I soon discovered they considered me a news reporter. What?? Having only written for magazines, this was an entirely new experience for me and one I didn’t recall signing up for. There were not only very strict word count rules, but also word usage rules. Adjectives and adverbs of any kind that could be construe d as my opinion or lead the reader to believe I felt a certain way were forbidden. My editor chopped and chopped on my next article, very kindly explaining to me that as a news reporter I could not write like a columnist. And when I say kindly…I mean that literally. He was extremely kind and patient while remaining professional and trying to teach me this new way of writing.
Being a poet and fiction writer, taking away all emotionally descriptive terms was painful to say the least. If I found something exciting, beautiful, fun, sad…whatever, I could not convey it in my writing in any way. I was to write just the facts and figures with a few quotes from the people I interviewed. I had to do this in such a way that the readers would have to make up their own minds as to whether it was fun, exciting, beautiful and so on, but would be unable to discern my feelings about the subject. It was an easy writing method to learn, but one I found very difficult to enjoy. As a writer, I like to leave my stamp on the things I write. Even if it’s a subject that’s been written about a thousand times before, I want to make it mine.
After my first article was published (the personal experience one) the editor said he loved my down to earth, conversational style and that the readers loved it too. I had a lot of people come up to me on the street and offer compliments on that first article. I didn’t receive a lot of feedback on the ones that followed. I think this is because when reading that first article, they could feel my excitement and it generated excitement in them. With the articles that followed, it was just like reading the news and these weren’t really news reports, they were articles about specific subjects. I think taking away my personal stamp diminished these articles and thus they weren’t nearly as interesting to the readers. I completely understand the need for news reporters to just report the facts, but article writers should have no such constraints. After writing many newspaper articles, I’ve learned something important. I am not nor will I ever be a news reporter.
©Elizabeth Melton Parsons
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