Reporting That Matters: Public Affairs Coverage

Public Affairs Reporting offers an inclusive and diverse perspective to public affairs reporting.

It expands the traditional approach to public affairs reporting beyond the mainstay of local and regional news coverage to include virtually everything that is involved in public life: from government to the arts, religion to the environment, business to law enforcement, and more. “Professional Tips” sections in each chapter provide a series of questions and answers from professional journalists.

Reporting That Matters offers an inclusive and diverse perspective to public affairs reporting, showing students how to present the news in ways that engage and empower their audiences.

This book seeks to demystify news about government and public issues and thus show student journalists how to present it in ways that engage and empower readers, viewers, and listeners. It expands the traditional approach to public affairs reporting beyond the mainstay of local and regional news coverage to include virtually everything that is involved in public life: from government to the arts, religion to the environment, business to law enforcement, and more. In this, the authors emphasize the importance of understanding every facet of the community and the idea that public affairs reporting should focus less on institutions and more on specific issues that concern the public.

Features

Reporting That Matters is committed to conveying the importance of a multicultural approach to public affairs reporting, expanding beyond the reliance on “official sources”–elected officials, government agency heads, and public affairs officers. Students are encouraged to include underrepresented communities in their coverage, and to reflect the diversity of their audiences–including differences in age, economic status, sexual orientation, and ability/disability.

“Professional Tips” sections in each chapter provide a series of questions and answers from professional journalists, so students receive reinforcement from experts who practice journalism every day.

The text covers a broad range of topics in public affairs reporting, including information on the changing world of journalism, story idea generation, interviewing, team reporting, storytelling, narrative style, and finding and getting a job.

Relevant, interactive, and challenging exercises in each chapter offer students hands-on experience that goes beyond theory development to provide opportunities to interact outside the classroom.

An informal, less academic tone makes the sometimes complex and perplexing field of public affairs reporting more accessible to students. The text adopts a conversational tone and includes the authors’ personal experiences.

A comprehensive “Reporting Resources Lists and Links” section provides more than 120 resources for students, including local government/politics, newspapers, videos, magazines, ethics, and journalism organizations.

Praise for Reporting That Matters

“The strength of this text relies in the real world examples the authors include. You need examples to engage the student and to illustrate the various techniques reporters need to use in reporting and interviewing . . . this book does that.”
–Tracy Montgomery Schoenberg, Ramapo College

“The greatest strength of this text is the ease in reading…writing in the first person gives the text life.”
–Sheila M. Whitley, North Carolina A&T State University

“[This book] is strong in terms of its conversational style, breadth of coverage and focus on the broad-based skills and situation most common to journalists.”
–Steven E. Chappell, Truman State University