NEWS WRITING:

The News Writing and Reporting

PHOTO: Journalists at Work.

By Maritim Kipngetich

“I am a veteran and I repeat that I am a veteran, so you can be rest assured that you are in good hands,” Mr. Magayo Magayo, who teaches News Writing and Reporting at School of Journalism, University of Nairobi, said to us after normal greetings in his office situated at third floor room 309 in the Educational Building.

The gentleman, who is probably in his early 60s, had one important thing to tell us before introducing the course. “You must know how to write very well in journalism since journalism is basically about writing,” he said.

We were a little bit perplexed since we had a class inside his office because we were only three students, so the office would accommodate all of us. It is natural for students to fear their lecturers, so because we were all seated facing one another with the lecturer, I would see my colleagues feeling uncomfortable.

Mr. Magayo, who said he worked with the Nation Media Group as a reporter in 1980s, later on promoted to be sub-editor and then rose to the post of the editor, had a lot of pieces of advice to tell aspiring print journalists like the three of us who were in his class.

He then introduced the lesson by letting us go through the course outline he had given us. The number one item in the course outline was “forms of journalistic writing”. Mr. Magayo had one thing to stress here.

“There are only two stories in journalistic writing: the feature and the news stories,” he emphasized.

The next item in the course outline was “qualities of good news writing”. He said there are so many qualities of news writing, but he decided to discuss some he had listed in the course outline. The discussion of the news writing in that class, interested me most. He explained to us what every quality meant by using a lot of examples.

He continued discussing other topics in the course outline casually, but when he was discussing a sub topic about “conducting interviews” he had to stress that interviews are what journalists depend on mostly when they are collecting information.

“Interview is a tool for a reporter to gather information about the stories they write,” Mr. Magayo said.