Conventional Journalism

Link:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-jan-brewer-20120126,0,3363048.story

This article from the Los Angeles Times represents the conventional journalism because it follows the rules established for it.  The article answers the main questions used in typical journalism, which are: Who, What, When and Where. And then there is: How and Why; those are used but are not mandatory. In this specific news article the answers to the questions are:

•      Who? President Obama and Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer.
•      What? That they both seemed to be having an argument when he arrived at Arizona. And that the governor was even seen jabbing a finger to the president. But prior to this, the governor and the president had already had a problem due to the fact that the Brewer called Obama patronizing and condescending, and apparently he did not appreciated it.
•      When? In Obama’s last visit to Arizona this Wednesday. January 25, 2012.
•      Where? In Phoenix airport.
•      How? The argument was done while they were greeting each other and the governor wrote about the president’s style as patronizing and condescending   in a memoir written by her a long time ago.
•      Why? The verbal argument was due to the president’s problem in the way he was described. But the way Brewer wrote about the president could be due to the fact of their different political views, since they are from opposing parties.

This article is conventional because it answers the questions conventional journalism is concern with. Most of the articles that belong to conventional journalism include a lot of research for they respond to true events but there are exceptions, like this article for it involved research but not a great deal of it. However, all type of conventional journalism is based on true events and there is no exception for this. In some articles some facts may be wrong but still conventional journalism should only respond to true events. 

Literature and Journalism

Literature: It is a way of communicating with aesthetics, it is an art, that might be fictional or non- fictional.

Main characteristics:

•      Words, feeling, technique.
•      Creative meaning. The creative of the author.
•       Might be the reflection of a historical period.
•     Can be oral or written.
•      Narrative styles.

Journalism: It is a way of communicating based on events, facts, events and it targets an audience. It is a profession that looks for the answers of specific questions.

Main Characteristics:

•       Research of events.
•      Responds to the questions: When/ Where/What/Who/Why/How.
•     It responds to true events.

The union between literature and journalism is called: Literary Journalism, which appears “In Cold Blood” by Turman Capote.

Literary Journalism: Some elements of literature combined with the rigor and research of journalism. 

Questions

1.            What motivated Capote to write? Capote wrote because it helped him express himself in a world that didn't understand his ways. He was misunderstood form the very beginning and that gave him the strength to stand alone. But that lonileness drove him to write which gave him independent form the outside world and helped him explore and become himself. He also started to write with the objective of wining a prize in some local contest organized by some club that held parties on sundays that gave away free food.  
2.                   What kind of stories did he write? Capote began by writing stories of what was going on around his town, the interesting activities of his neighbors. Capote was writing gossip about the people that lived nearby  and so his stories could produce certain scandals in the small town he used to live in. 
3.            What are his influences? Capote was greatly influenced by writers such as: Virginia Wolf, Henry James, Hemingway, Flaubert, Maupassant, Mansfield, Proust, Chokov,etc. For as he said it himself when talking about technique: "Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence." Or when he was imagining himself a big author he would compare himself with those writers: "went around staring at myself in mirrors and sucking in my cheeks and thinking over in my mind, my lad, you and Flaubert—or Maupassant or Mansfield or Proust or Chekhov or Wolfe, whoever was the idol of the moment."

"All literature is gossip." Truman Capote

The quote above means that literature can never be an absolute fact for it is doomed to depend on the author’s point of view. Literature is simply gossip whether it is based on fiction or reality because it will always be originated in the writer’s mind.