Press Cliping Analysis - Essay Example

Press Cliping Analysis (Press Article Black comedy takes dark turn) Defining a journalist today seems more and more difficult. If you say a journalist is a communicator, it becomes too wide and anyone with access to a media or even Internet can be a communicator. If you say a journalist is the person who informs; well, public relations people and publicists inform as well. It seems that one of the only things that truly defines a journalist is the technique used in the process of communicating the news.

Here is an analysis of the differences between a media release and the article that was sourced from it.Unlike the media release, the article has a more interesting title. It has to be something attractive and precise that can catch the reader's attention. In this case, the title is "Black comedy takes dark turn". We have here one of the first and most important news values: interest. With a creative title like this which makes a play on words - black and dark - the reader gets immediately hooked.

There is a hint there will be conflict and drama, but we don't exactly know what it is, so we want to read more. The media release does not include background information about the subject (Mr. Vizard), it is only preoccupied with communicating the main fact: the Australian Securities and Investments Comission (ASIC) has commenced civil penalty proceedings against Stephen Vizard, after "he breached his duty as director of Telstra Corporation Limited by improperly using information given to him, to gain an advantage for either himself and/or others.

" The style of the article makes it closer or more familiar to the reader (proximity), since it uses metaphors and images, for example: "Cornerbox had a few irons in the fire". And also, it has more common language expressions such as: "cracked a few gags"or, "things had been looking up".The use of the adjectives is more frequent in the article as well, which gives us a more colorful description of the events.The main difference between the article and the media release is that the journalist is telling us a story, while the publicist is informing us about the facts.

The journalist is a storyteller, the facts in his own words give us a new perspective of the piece of news. This idea is supported by how the events are chronologically ordered. In the article, the order makes it possible to have a story-like structure, with a beginning, a middle, a climax ("the Steve Vizard story arced back from black comedy to tragedy, and the dark past returned with a vengeance") and an ending, which in this case is still uncertain: "the Federal Court will decide what sort of ending thi sstory will have".

The media release meets a different purpose. It uses clear, consice sentences, precise verbs and as few adjectives as possible. It communicates the events by answering the basic informative questions: who, when, where ,what and how. It provides the reader (the journalist in this case) with the facts that need to be known. Its interest is not to convey an emotion in the reader or describing in detail a scene. The journalist's tecnique can make the facts seem more "newsworthy" by applying a different structure and style.

Each press piece meets different objectives, although they are both telling the same news.