Two ways to start
Two openings for a piece about media.
A. Nowadays the media plays a very important role in the society and it affects the people in many different ways.
B. Two hundred local newspapers have closed in this country since 2005, and the coverage of that fact has been almost entirely about newspapers. It is the least interesting part of it.
Four questions.
1. How many article errors are in opening A?
2. Is the media an error?
3. What does B give the reader in two sentences?
4. What is B’s second sentence doing?
The model · 359 words
What closed with the local paper
Two hundred local newspapers have closed in this country since 2005, and the coverage of that fact has been almost entirely about newspapers. It is the least interesting part of it.
What closed was not a product. It was a seat. Local papers put one person in a magistrates’ court and one person in a council chamber, every week, for a hundred years — and the value of that was almost never in what got printed. Most council meetings produce nothing worth a paragraph, and hardly anybody else in the town attends them. The point was that somebody was in the room, and that everybody in the room knew it.
Nothing has replaced the seat. Broadcast local news covers a region rather than a town, and covers it from a studio. Hyperlocal sites exist, are often good, and are almost all run by one person in the evenings, which is not the same thing as a job. Councils now stream their meetings, which sounds like a solution and is not: an unattended stream is a recording of a room in which nobody is watching, and the people in that room can tell.
There is one study I keep coming back to, and I am relying on one rather than several, which is worth saying out loud. It found that borrowing costs for local authorities rose measurably after the closure of their local paper — not because anybody behaved worse, but because lenders price scrutiny. Whether that generalises beyond the sample I have no idea.
I am not making a claim about journalists, most of whom did not want to leave. I am making one about a mechanism. The seat was paid for by classified advertising, which went somewhere else in about four years, and nothing about the usefulness of the seat had anything to do with what happened to be paying for it.
Which leaves an uncomfortable position rather than a proposal. Local reporting was funded by an accident. The accident ended. Nothing I have read explains what should fund it now, and the honest thing is to say so rather than to end on a call for support.
Four questions about the model.
1. What does the second paragraph replace “a product” with?
2. Why does the writer say I am relying on one rather than several?
3. What does the fifth paragraph refuse to claim?
4. How does the piece end?
Repair a weaker one
The five moves: a number and a period, and the reading you are rejecting · what the thing actually was, restated · what has and has not replaced it · the evidence, with its weight named · the mechanism, and the honest absence of a proposal.
Below, a second critique with four sentences removed.
Four sentences have been removed. Put each one back where it belongs.
Engagement is the most misread number in the industry, and it is misread in one specific way. [1]
A story that makes people angry is engaged with more than a story that informs them, and both appear in the same column. [2] It is that the column does not distinguish between them, and nothing downstream of it can.
[3] An editor looking at it can tell you which stories were read; they cannot tell you which were believed, which were resented, or which cost a reader an afternoon.
None of which makes the number useless. [4]
It makes it a measurement of attention that has been asked to stand in for a measurement of value — which is a different job, and one it was never built for.
From loose to counted
Rewrite each line for a written media critique. Fix the articles, name the class, and lose the speech. The words in the avoid list must not appear.
Loose → written critique
Nowadays the people do not trust the media because of the social media.
Loose → written critique
The journalism is dying and the young people do not read anything.
Vague class → named class
The consumer expects news to be free.
Unsourced → sourced
Studies show that local paper closures cost councils money.
Blame → mechanism
Editors chose to make everything about celebrities.
Spoken → written critique
At the end of the day the television is basically just entertainment now.
Three questions.
1. What goes in the first two sentences?
2. You want to write the reader as a generic. What do you check?
3. You have one study and no replication. What do you write?
The piece
How the twenty-three minutes run. Five to plan, fourteen to write, four to exchange — and the exchange is a sweep, not a proofread.
Stage 1 · Alone · 5 minutes · Plan
A media question you know something about: local news, headlines, podcasts, recommendation feeds, sport coverage, science reporting, a platform you have left, a paper you still read.
Five lines, and every class you intend to name written out with its article already chosen.
- 1 · The number and the period, and the reading you are going to reject.
- 2 · What the thing actually is or was, restated in one sentence.
- 3 · The evidence, with its weight named: one study or several, measured or reported.
- 4 · The mechanism — what would produce this even if nobody chose it.
- 5 · List every class you will name — readers, journalists, platforms, coverage — and write the article beside each one now.
Stage 2 · Alone · 14 minutes · Write
Three hundred and sixty words, five or six paragraphs.
Fourteen minutes. Every generic in the right pattern, every definite article on a route.
- Open with the number and the rejection. No general statement about the modern world and no nowadays.
- Name the class every time you generalise, and use zero plus plural unless the class is genuinely a type.
- Say the weight of your evidence in the same clause as the evidence.
- Make it a claim about a mechanism rather than about people, wherever that is honest.
- Close on the position that survives. If you have no proposal, say so.
Stage 3 · Pairs · 4 minutes · The sweep
Swap. Two passes, exactly as in Lesson 4, and no reading for meaning.
Four minutes. Mark every noun phrase, then license every the.
- Pass one: mark every noun phrase C (class) or M (member). Do not follow the argument.
- Pass two: for every the in front of an M, write the route. Circle any with none.
- Then the four categories: classes of people, fields, bare abstract nouns, media idioms. Check those four again specifically.
- Write the error count at the top and hand it back. Then say one thing about the argument, because your partner has just written something and nobody should get only a number.
What the sweep found
Two questions.
1. How many article errors did your partner find?
2. Which category still produced most of them?
The class, and the article
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. When you generalise, what is the default pattern?
2. What licenses a definite article in front of a member?
Next. The unit task: a spoken critique and the finished piece, both swept — and the last count anybody will do for you.