Thisisgettingsilly's Blog

Hard (and soft) facts!

April 12, 2010 at 12:10 am (Uncategorized)

I’m a soft boiled egg man myself. I find when an egg is hard boiled, it loses its flavour. I mean it does the job, it will fill me up and I will be generally satisfied, but a soft boiled egg is a bit juicier and I am more likely to engage with my breakfast. That’s right, I said engage with my breakfast. Wow. Awkward. Anyway, I like my news the same way I like my eggs. Soft. And with Tabasco sauce splashed all over it! And maybe some bacon too. How good is bacon? I’m losing my point here. Let me explain…

The hard news stories provided were ‘RBA’s Stevens warns against housing speculation’ from Reuters and ‘Push to end underquoting as market stays hot’ by Marika Dobbin from The Age. Both of these articles get straight to the point without a crazy amount of detail. Hard news items I have read usually have a subject matter that only requires the basic facts. Both of these hard news items could definitely lend themselves to an editorial or opinion piece, however in the first instance, the writer/publication needs to deliver the basic facts.

There is no room for opinion or creative writing in the hard news items. I think this method of writing an article is extremely effective in getting the main points of a story across in a concise and efficient manner. It allows the reader to be educated and allows for follow up articles in the future. Kind of like a ‘watch this space’.  It also gives the reader the opportunity to do further investigation of the story should they desire to.  It is high level information only and keeps the reader’s attention.

It is of course limited in the amount of information it can provide. The reader is forced to wait and see if this story unfolds and more information comes to hand, or investigate it further themselves.  In the RBA article, it gives the reader some data and almost a ‘to be continued’ ending. Writers are also limited in how much they can quote their sources in hard news because of the lack of time they have to tell the story.

The RBA article is more basic and has less information than the Underquoting article. I think both are effective but for me personally, I was more engaged with the Underquoting article. That may be more to do with the fact that I know nothing about interest rates!

The soft news items were obviously able to provide more detail to the story they were telling. More quotes, more explanation, more everything! The Francois Ozon article had some lovely quotes and detailed the directors history. I found this to be very effective. For some reason the article about Vindaloo Against Violence didn’t engage me as much. I liked that it gave various viewpoints and quoting the ‘Stuff White People Like’ blog is always fun, but it was an opinion piece with very little opinion. Just a bit at the end.

I loved the Melbourne Gastronome blog. It was simple yet engaging writing with a lovely positive tone.  Obviously the writers’ style is very suited to blogging as she uses visuals to highlight her well chosen words. Having pictures interspersed with her stories was done very well. This article also made me very hungry. Oddly enough, not for boiled eggs.