By Brian Brooks, George Kennedy, Daryl Moen, and Don Ranly
Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999

Reviewer: Brad Thompson, Ph.D.
Penn State University

If writing is hard work (and it is), then teaching writing is doubly so. And writing a textbook on something so basic yet so difficult to do well probably is painful indeed. That should make the appearance of a sixth edition of News Reporting and Writing remarkable.

News Reporting and Writing claims to have new sections on public journalism, service journalism, online journalism, computer-assisted reporting and writing press releases. But the previous edition's chapter Sources and Searches is virtually identical to the new edition's Computer-Assisted Reporting chapter, although it is moved forward in the book as part of a section on reporting tools. A valuable box, however, cautions reporters on using information from the Internet without first verifying it with a source. The chapter on press releases also is largely unchanged from fifth edition except for the inclusion of two short subsections. These minor revisions reflect the evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes the authors have implemented. This edition is primarily a reorganization and repackaging, which testifies as much to the thoroughness of the previous five editions as it does to how painful it would be to write a textbook from scratch.

News Reporting and Writing has an accompanying Workbook and Instructor's Manual. (In addition, the publisher says it has plans for a web site to support the book.) Both the Workbook and Instructor's Manual follow the main text chapter by chapter. One series of writing exercises in the Workbook, for example, provides fact sets from which students write news stories about a criminal case from arrest through the trial and acquittal. The Instructor's Manual provides model stories. A few exercises also are provided at the end of each chapter in the main text.

News Reporting and Writing competes with books by Conrad Fink, Bruce D. Itule and Douglas Anderson, Melvin Mencher and Carole Rich. All are for beginning news reporting classes and emphasize print reporting but most also include a chapter each on broadcast and public relations writing. At least one even has a section on the special characteristics of writing for online media, although News Reporting and Writing does not. But generally these books all follow a similar pattern, and News Reporting and Writing is no exception: introduction to news and newsroom organization, sources and reporting tools, story structures and writing techniques, basic story types and specialized beats, and an obligatory nod to law and ethics.

The major problem with New Reporting and Writing - as with several similar books - is also its benefit: In an effort to be complete it covers more ground than students can absorb in a semester, but this also gives teachers the chance to individualize their classes. Teachers are able (required, really) to pick and choose among the 22 chapters.

One area to which News Reporting and Writing gives short shrift is note-taking, which involves more than the hoary debate about whether to tape or not to tape. This was the subject of a discussion in January 1999 on the Journet listserv. Indeed, few beginning reporting texts deal with this basic skill; two that do are Rich's Writing and Reporting News and Shirley Biagi's Interviews That Work. Because note-taking is overlooked by most texts, teachers may not spend much time working on it. Note-taking is usually an out-of-class experience, so teachers may not realize that poor student-written stories often are the result of inadequate notes. Several class exercises - such as using videotapes of city council meetings or, as Steve Doig of Arizona State recommended to the Journet list, distributing trial transcripts from which students can learn how people really speak - should be incorporated in the basic writing class. And note-taking pointers and exercises should be included in future editions of News Reporting and Writing.

In the interest of full disclosure, the authors were among my professors at the University of Missouri.

News Reporting and Writing is a solid text with years of experience backing it up. The authors are in the awkward position of updating a print-oriented textbook even as we are in the midst of a new media revolution. But the focus on traditional news values will serve students well in an online world - even if they don't yet realize it.