Author Description

Reporting for the Media, 10/e is a revision of our successful introduction to news writing and reporting, the basic course that all Journalism students take. It introduces students to what reporters do - engage the world around them, generate story ideas, gather information, and write stories. This book's sterling reputation is built on its thorough grounding in and focus on the basics: grammar, news writing style, traditional story structures, etc. This approach has allowed the text to retain much of its market share, and despite the changes that social media has brought about since the ninth edition published in 2008, it currently holds the #2 spot in the market. We reviewed the current edition with 4 users and 5 non-users. The book is very well respected, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with several specific suggestions for improvement. For this revision, chapters 1 and 2 will be combined into a single introductory chapter, with references and exercises relating to copy editing symbols removed from the text and placed on a companion website. Chapters 12 and 22 (Writing Obituaries and Becoming a Professional, respectively) will be removed from the text and placed on the website as well. The appendix containing the abridged AP Stylebook will also be moved to the website - reviewers indicated that because they require purchase of the AP stylebook as a supplemental text, neither they nor their students consult textbooks' abridged style guides often, and that the decision whether to adopt a text did not take into account such an appendix. To address the changing nature of how news is reported, the authors will add a chapter on writing for digital media and cross-platform storytelling. Finally, the framework of the text will be reorganized so that the text is broken into four parts, with the chapters that cover libel and ethics placed earlier, in part two.