Changing Journalism

For those of you who haven’t taken journalism or would like to reminisce about the bygone standard writing styles have changed over the years when it comes to reporting events as they happen. Reporters uses to answer a gammit of questions related to their subject before getting to the meat of the argument. Now they write shorter sentences based on answering a key question, like what happened. The key was to keep readership so that they would lose their clients.

Answering who did the action to get to the point did not matter to the reader. They had to be brief because too much information at the beginning of the sentence meant people would forget most of the details. Radio was a big influence during the war years and much was broadcast live. Announcers would clip their sentences as they spoke and that style influenced the writing pattern that had been inherited from an ealier prosaic period.

Today we have been facing the same modification imposed by email standards as sentences are being further clipped to address the need to communicate ideas and not full sentence forms. So often enough subjects are missing when they are understood and even spelling has been sacrificied for the use of abbreviated forms and acronyms.