What makes news writing special is the opportunity to be the first one in the room with the thing that everybody wants to hear. It’s kind of like when you meet up with your friends and you have a story that you just can’t wait to tell them—that’s essentially the job of news writing. But, instead of just meeting up with your friends, you get to tell tens—or even hundreds of thousands—of people something that you believe they need to know.

The key to news judgment is finding something that people are interested in but also something that they’ll benefit from knowing. Something that will make them better citizens or more informed voters. Something that will help them know where they’ll want to travel or help them be more prepared for what’s coming next in the world. With media writing, it’s always about finding a balance between the things that will get clicks and bring people to your website and the things that will actually enrich them for having read them.

I once had a great editor who told me that you want to write stories that get read, but you need to write stories that are worth reading. I’ve tried to follow that advice. One thing that’s special about news media, is that you aren’t telling the reader what you think might be true, or what you’ve had a hunch about. Instead, you’re telling them what you know; what you’ve sussed out, nailed down, verified, confirmed, and what you can say with full confidence that you know to be true.

Personally, I think that’s where you build your reputation as a good news writer—when people come to you, hear what you say, and don’t feel the need to check three or four other sources. When they think “okay, this is a place I can come to for information that’s verified, and I can take it as a known fact”, that’s when you’re doing your job well.

Standard media education and online media education are excellent places to start on the path towards understanding the media industry, and what it takes to be a good news writer.

When it comes to entertainment stories, the people who really excel at media writing are people who become super fans and want to be in this business to take a peek behind the curtain and see how things operate, get a media education. When I was very young, I was obsessed with watching as many movies as I could and watching as much TV as I could. My mom picked up a letter from me when I was 5 years old, and it said “I just want to eat popcorn and watch movies all day for a living.” I got about as close to that as I could, having a real job.

People are putting their hearts and souls into these productions, and when a movie bombs opening weekend and everybody’s making fun of it on Twitter, years of people’s lives and their livelihoods have banked on the movie’s success. There are a lot of different parts of the making-a-movie stew that can screw up, and the movie goes from an Academy Award winner to total dust. There are so many parts that go into making a movie, and people work so hard to put their all into it. It’s such a tight rope of putting yourself out there. If you really are passionate about learning those stories from people, that makes a great entertainment writer, and that makes a great entertainment story.

Alongside that, you want to be able to pull yourself out and be professional enough to know that there is a business element about the media industry. Like at “Variety,” we’ve been known for more than 100 years as the business of entertainment. That’s our slogan because we want to break down the deals in the deal-making. It’s the intersection of loving art and then understanding the commerce behind it.

Entertainment and media journalists have a bit of a luxury. They tend to be a little bit more adventurous and curious than other journalists and other fields I’ve met with, wanting to understand what’s new. The music journalists at our publication, they’re all musicians in their spare time, and they’re not stuck in whatever decade they came of age listening to music. They’re wanting to hear what’s fresh, what’s new, and really act upon that. One of the things about my job that makes me the happiest is finding that small movie or that small record that you really think deserves a bigger platform and then telling people how great it is.

If you want to keep that content fresh, you’re gonna want to keep the site refreshed, updated, and current. You’re gonna want to be on all social media platforms and integrate yourself in a way that is natural while not trying too hard to fit in. We at “Variety” always know that we are a business publication. So when we go on Tik Tok, for example, we’re teaching people how to make it in the entertainment industry or how to be an entertainment journalist. It’s a type of online media education. We’re trying to comment on these platforms from our vantage of knowledgeability plus trying to remain current and keep ahead of things.

This module is really an overview of media writing. It will help you understand the professional landscape of becoming a writer in today’s media industry, which is always in flux. Be prepared to change, and be prepared to pivot. The following information will help you understand how to become a media writer in the Digital Era and beyond. In this first module, you’ll understand what it takes to become a professional writer in today’s digital, print, and broadcast industries. Journalism has history, and this module will introduce you to that history. You’ll learn about the landscape of media education and all the skills that it takes to become successful, especially in this Digital Era where everything is in flux as it has changed so much over time. Online media education offers you the ability to navigate this exciting and complex landscape as a dynamic career opportunity.

Good writing is made up of many elements. Writers must display natural curiosity, passion and a drive to undertake the hard work of writing. Writers must write a great deal, writing and revising, practicing consistently to hone their craft.

Learning to write is much like learning to play an instrument. Good writers put in the hours to improve their craft, yet there are those who do not truly understand the process of learning to be a good writer. If one chooses to undertake media writing, that person must put in the effort to learn exactly how that area is unique.

There are those budding writers who become confused about writing, and they might best benefit from media education. These individuals initially think to themselves, “I’m literate; I can read. Surely, I can put letters together, form words, and then make sentences that will form paragraphs.” While it is true that this is a form of writing, that does not necessarily make good writing.

Good writing is something that many in online media education are attempting to explain and teach. However, many teachers are still learning the craft themselves! They need a professor to challenge them in writing essays and other media.

I once had a professor that challenged my classmates and I to an essay contest. During my freshman year, the professor gave the assignment, and my first thought was, “I’m a smart kid; I know how to write an essay.”

However, when the professor returned our essays, he explained that most of the essays had earned “F’s” with a few earning a “D.” There were two essays that had been awarded a “C” – an average grade – and the professor explained that those two writers had “fought for” that grade.

Many years passed before I understood why he gave the class such an assignment. The essay was not about explaining what good writing is; he taught us that we needed to “show” rather than “tell” in our essays. The assignment was not truly to explain good writing, but to demonstrate to the professor good writing techniques in my own work.

What is good writing? Good writing exhibits concrete details that paint a picture for the writer’s audience. Good writing expresses points of view, and it utilizes words in specific ways. Good writing should be structured to a point so that readers can follow the passage. It is not vague. Readers should be able to not only access what the writer is trying to say, but to understand the details and supports for a specific point of view.

Good writers are able to express themselves in a meaningful way throughout the media industry. People must be able to grasp what writers are intending to express. It should be accessible, using vocabulary that is appropriate but not so challenging to readers that they can’t understand the concepts behind the essay. Writers should work to lessen any “speed bumps” for readers – wordiness, unfamiliar words, lack of context clues or jargon in one’s writing. Good writing grabs the reader’s attention and holds it for the duration. It stimulates the mind and leaves the reader understanding the writer’s point of view and perhaps inquisitive to learn more.

At the most elemental level, when you consider what art or story is, you’re thinking about the first moment of consciousness or awareness. At the beginning of civilization, humans made marks all over the wilderness to chart their movements. These were just arrows or instructions on how to find an animal or a plant food source. Later, we began to put marks on the trees or structural walls that symbolized internal meanings.

That’s the start of creating a story where you have not only the external information, the goal or destination, but also the internal emotion that came with it. That is the launch of communication media.

At its base configuration, you’ve got art or storytelling as the meeting of external and internal story elements. And there are few exceptions when you’re thinking about art or media forms, whether high art, low art, big-budget movies, experimental films, literary novels, or paperback novels. There’s always an external and internal story.

In high art, the internal story is more strongly emphasized. The more base and genre-linked the story, the more attraction it holds for the masses when an external story is emphasized. A high-action film is all the physical activities. But if you have an action hero with no internal story, audiences are just not interested, we can’t watch.

But you can think about the story in other ways as well. The E.M. Forester example, which is often cited by writing instructors and literary gurus, is the king died and then the queen died, right? That’s not a story yet. That’s just external fact. The king died – and the queen died of grief is a story because the plot provides an internal story as well.

In journalism, it’s the same. It’s very hard to just report media facts without bringing an internal story. People will ask, “Where’s the story?” It’s something that can be quite irritating if you’re a journalist trying to share helpful information with the public: “These are important facts; I want to get this information out there.” But your editor, a staunch member of the media industry, is saying that there’s no story because there is no internal content.

The public has a really, really hard time remembering or relating to any external facts in media writing without internal content or media education. But I don’t think that that’s really part of storytelling as much as it is part of us. That’s just the way we relate to information and how we structure our memories. It’s also how that we relate to each other. With the help of online media education, people can learn to appreciate the internal story in art and journalism while developing a deeper ability to understand human nature.

The ability to research is a must-have quality for those in the media. Because video and audio clips are forever, nothing is more embarrassing than for a media industry professional or spokesperson to be caught relaying disinformation.

However, most spokespeople rely on a researcher to take the time to go through articles, compile data, and determining the facts around a topic.

Researchers can make a successful career out of these skills. They may research for the media spokesperson, or they may work as a researcher for documentary productions. A research staff person is critical in providing the production staff with the vital information on a topic. A research staff person is a bit like a computer database; they are expected to hold on to various bits and pieces of information over time. Some even report the information they compile. Others take part in media education projects working behind the scenes.

Some research staff members may put their research to use in a variety of ways. They may write for a newspaper, or they may be a part of a new group of online media writing enterprises, such as blogs and podcasts. Podcasts are becoming highly popular as more and more are depending upon online media education for their information.

One can use reading, writing and research skills in a number of ways in the online world today. A research staff member is able to contribute much to a media organization, and many employment opportunities to utilize those skills are present in the job market today.