... The Guardian newspaper Saturday Travel Section - this weekend their articles featured:
"Adventures for everyone. From extreme rafting to camping for wimps."
If you can't get the Guardian, any broadsheet with a travel section will do, only you will be reading it to learn, not to be entertained.
Take this weekends main feature, "Fancy a Paddle," by Ian Belcher, about white water rafting in Tasmania. This was a really good read, and although Ian doesn't probably doesn't know this, he presented a lot of learning for any budding photojournalist.
So how does this work?
The first task is to ascertain the status of the author, are they a staff writer or freelancer? A quick Google takes care of this. Ian's a freelancer who has also contributed to the Times as well as a number of smaller titles. He has also run travel journalism workshops in London where he has been joined by some very worthy guest speakers. Now I can be confident I'm learning from someone with a track record.
The next step is to analyse the article. to treat it like a jigsaw puzzle that has already been put together. The task is to reconstruct it, to find a pattern that if duplicated with another subject, will lead to similar success.
Some of the factors to consider:
How the article starts
How it leads into the main body from the start
How quotes are introduced and what themes do they support
Number of anecdotes
How 5WH is integrated into the main body of the article
The balance and mix of emotionally charged anecdotes vs. actual description
Factfile content
Photographs
Without boring you, the list is quite long and it does take time to do this. But once you have successfully dissected the anatomy of an article you are in a position to duplicate it. This isn't plagiarism, you're not copying anything other than patterns - a recipe for success.
This is how I managed to get my first article published (really, the only time I had written a 'story' before that was at school), all I did was dissect articles that had been authored by the editorial staff followed the application of what I had learnt to my idea.
if you are a budding photojournalist, don't think you'll amaze the editor with your novel writing style. The only writing style you need is what the editor is looking for and this technique will enable you to do this - your own style can develop once you are established.
Keep writing...
Brendan
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