Lecture #2 feat. Rod Chester

Anyone who attended lecture #2 with guest speaker Rod Chester has to admit that the guy is pretty darn entertaining.
As a budding journalism student it was wonderful to see someone who has had such a decorated career in the field and clearly loves what he does.
The revelation that Australian's still purchase 20 million newspapers a week was interesting as even though newspaper sales may have gone downhill, the industry seems to be doing okay. Grande are the days of waking up, having a coffee and breakfast and reading the paper; I find there's something comforting in that daily-grind routine of it all.
As Rod Chester is a journalist for the Courier mail, the lecture was focused greatly on news writing. Amongst all of the tips and tricks was the inverted pyramid (see below).

The inverted pyramid may seem like a basic model but is fundamental to news writing and when you think about it, every news article uses the structure.

As well as news articles, Rod addressed writing feature articles, stating that there are many types of feature articles including:

• personality profiles
• human interest stories
• trend stories
• in depth-stories
• backgrounders
• colour

In feature stories, there are certain elements as follows:

• use a thread
• use transition
• use dialogue when possible
• establish a voice
• conclude with a quotation or part of a thread
• choose the theme
• write a lead that invited an audience in to the story
• provide pivotal background information
• write clean concise sentences.

Along with these tips, Rod suggested using wordplay, alliteration, metronome powerful language, shock elements, etc. to zazz up the average feature article.

After a very informative lecture, Rod Chester suggested that the best tips he can provide are simply as follows:

Read and write.