Reflection of New Rhetoric for News

 by K.C. Powers

A brand new approach to journalism, that’s what author Jack Fuller was expanding upon perpetually in his writing titled “New Rhetoric for News.” He highlighted the fact that today’s audience that we write for is growing and changing, something that we have to prepare for and, for the most part, aren’t properly educated to handle.

Fuller didn’t wish to discredit years of practiced and perfected methods, but he stated quite clearly that with today’s broader audience, development in communications skills was somewhat more relevant to journalism than the methods of “How to write”. It’s true that you need to learn the styling of journalistic writing as well as develop a keen filter for relevant and meaningful data,  becoming a terse and bland writer will find your hard work sitting idle and unobserved.

Fuller points out that there are two main audiences that we deal with now; our original audience that consists of the hard and fact oriented business. This was/is an enduring audience who use the news media in order to understand and influence their practices from daily life to work and even political decisions.  The new audience which Fuller speaks of is a far cry from the usual intellectual sorts, but rather your everyday sort who, by grace of accessibility, find themselves immersed in an ever growing educated world. 

With accessibility to the latest happenings in the form of television, radio, and internet, it becomes hard to compete with “interesting” stories when you’re only focusing on “important stories”. While the modern journalist must retain his or her filter for importance, they must now train themselves to be entertainers and to learn ways of catching the eye of the reader.

Although Fuller states the relevance of communicative skills and inventive imagery, he renounces tabloids as being “tasteless” and “trivial.” He criticizes their tendency of overlooking fact for the pursuit of entertaining and glamorous stories. Their methods of blasting what little content they have on the front page and then falling short of any real content beyond that. Jack does point out that they do have one thing right though, their ability to grab a reader’s interest by headline alone is impeccable. If there’s one thing that is necessary now, that attention-grabbing skill is a must-have in order to sell your stories.

Today’s audience is huge; we have so many outlets for news and so many eyes and ears waiting for the next big story. It comes as no surprise that with the internet being so readily accessible and school studies being so broad that our audience has grown. Though the angles may be different and your readers may have varying interests, one thing shall always remain clear; Do not underestimate your readers and do not sacrifice the meaningfulness of your stories. Instead, let them sell themselves, you just need to learn how to give them mouths.