Exercise 5.Retell the text.
МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Крымский федеральный университет имени В.И. Вернадского»
ТАВРИЧЕСКАЯ АКАДЕМИЯ
Институт иностранной филологии
Кафедра иностранных языков № 2
Разговорная тема
WHAT MAKES A GOOD JOURNALIST?
(3 семестр)
"What makes a good journalist? Many things. Even journalists will disagree on the order of importance of the qualities that go to make a good journalist. But they are all agreed that paramount in the make-up of a journalist is a deep and genuine interest in people - good people, bad people (who often make good news!), famous people, humble people, rich people, poor people, old people, young people, Black people. White people - people of every type - everywhere.
A person who has not this interest in other people will never make a good journalist. So. if you are not very interested in other people and think that most people are a bit of a nuisance and you prefer not to have anything more to do with them than is necessary, journalism is not for you.
Hand in hand with this interest in people, should go the qualities of sympathy (so that you can see the other side of an issue even if you disagree with the person who holds it), open-mindedness (so that you do not make a hasty ill-informed judgement) and an inquiring mind (so that you can really get to the bottom of the thing you are asking about). Last, but certainly not least, the journalist needs to have humility. That does not mean that lie goes around like a Sunday School teacher! But it does mean that the man who thinks he is a pretty clever chap and does not mind the world knowing about it, will never make a good journalist. The journalist - certainly the reporter - spends most of his day talking or listening to other people, and none of us is very fond of the man who is a show-off, who thinks he knows it all.
So these are the basic qualities for a journalist, but the required qualifications are very different things.
Let us look at the qualifications a journalist needs. Obviously he must be well enough educated to be able to write fairly clearly in whatever language it is he hopes to work in. The best journalists write simple, plain, direct English, generally preferring short words to long ones.
What about the rest of the educational qualifications for a journalist? Often it is the pupil who was fairly good at five or six subjects, and not brilliant at just one, who makes the best journalist. These sort of people seem rather better balanced, as it were, for the sort of life a journalist leads - often with a nose in half a dozen things in one day - than the specialist, who was so interested in, say, biology, that he never took much interest in history geography, literature and other subjects.
But of course, nobody can say exactly what the best qualifications for a career in journalism are. They will vary enormously, according to the individual. There are plenty of highly successful journalists who were generally at the bottom of the class when they were at school, while many a man with a university degree has failed to make any mark in journalism.
МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Крымский федеральный университет имени В.И. Вернадского»
ТАВРИЧЕСКАЯ АКАДЕМИЯ
Институт иностранной филологии
Кафедра иностранных языков № 2
Разговорная тема
JOURNALISM IS INFORMATION
(3 семестр)
What is journalism? Journalism is information. It is communication. It is the events of the day distilled into a few words, sounds or pictures, processed by the mechanics of communication to satisfy the human curiosity of the world that is always eager to know what's new.
Journalism is basically news. The word derives from "journal"; its best contents are "du jour", of the day itself. But journalism may also be entertainment and reassurance to satisfy the human frailty of a world that is always eager to be comforted with the knowledge that out there are millions of human beings just like us.
Journalism is the television picture beamed by satellite direct from the Vietnam War, showing men dying in agony. It is the television picture of a man stepping on to the surface of the moon, seen in millions of homes as it happens.
Journalism can communicate with as few people as a classroom news-sheet or a parish magazine, or as with many people as there are in the world.
The cave-man drawing a buffalo on the wall of his home did so to give other hunters the news that buffaloes were nearby. The town-crier reciting the news in the market-place provided a convenient way in which a number of people could simultaneously learn facts affecting all their lives.
Today the news media are swamped by the very availability of news. There is simply more of it than ever before - unimaginably more, available to many more people. This is a transformation that has been achieved in a little over 100 years.
When admiral Lord Nelson died aboard the Victory after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, it took two weeks for the news to reach the Admiralty in London (a young lieutenant of the Royal Navy brought the dispatches personally, sailing in the sloop Pickle to Plymouth and then riding to London). It was some hours before important people in London heard the news, some days before it reached the other cities of Britain. There must have been outlying villages that the news took even longer to reach.
When President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dalias, Texas, in November 1963, the news of his death was known around the whole world in a matter of second. The political leaders of Russia and China, the Financial manipulators in Geneva, the obscure tribesmen of Borneo all heard the news simultaneously.
This profound change in the pattern of human communication has taken place in hardly more than one man's lifetime.
Even forty years ago most people in the developed world obtained their news from the newspapers. The newspapers had changed little from the days of Caxton. The process of printing had hardly changed at all, and the only modernization had been in machinery to produce and distribute a greater number of copies each issue. Then radio arrived.
At first newspapers regarded it as a passing technical fad. One director of the Press Association returned from America in 1923 and said that broadcasting is on the wane... People are getting so tired of it that it reminds one of the almost forgotten skating-rink craze". He was, of i nurse, profoundly wrong. In America, the effects of radio were more rapid in appearing, due to the springing up of hundreds of small town radio station Britain, radio was put under the control of a non-profit- making body financed by government-collected license fees and charged with the duty of providing a nationwide broadcasting service.
The war reports of the BBC radio from 1939 to 1945 should have warned newspapers that radio could rival them in the presentation of news. But it was not until television was introduced in Britain in 1956 (with the commercially backed Independent Television Authority rivaling the BBC's television service) that the television set entered 80 per cent of British homes and the way in which most people learnt their news changed radically.
Journalism is about people. It is produced for people. So how has the ordinary man's receptivity to journalism changed in twenty years?
Fifty years ago, a family might listen to a news bulletin on the living- room radio over breakfast. Father would read his morning paper over breakfast or on the bus or train going to work. After work, he would buy an evening paper and read it on the way home, handing it over to his wife who would read it when she had washed up after the evening meal. Then they might listen to the BBC nine o'clock radio news.
What happens now? The bedside transistor radio switches itself on with the alarm. Mother has her radio on in the kitchen as she cooks breakfast. The kids have their radios switched to Radio One with its mixture of pop music and news flashes. Father glances at the morning paper over breakfast, then gets into the car and turns on "Today" as he drives to work. Mother carries the radio around the house as she dusts aтd, makes the beds to the voice of jimmy Young. Father buys an evening paper as he leaves work, glances at the headlines, then turns on the six o'clock radio news as lie drives home. After eating, they turn on the telly and sit down to an evening's viewing. Mother may read the evening paper if there is a sports programme on TV which she finds boring. They watch the BBC's television nine o'clock or ITN's "News at Ten".
It is an immense change. These are the people for whom journalists are working. They have to lake account of these social changes, which have occurred in most countries of the world.
The newspaperman has to be aware of the changes in the lives of his readers. It is not enough for him to print the "hard news" of the evening before (most national newspapers start printing their major editions around 10 pm, with further editions for the city in which they are produced coming up until 4 am), since his readers who look at the paper over breakfast will have heard most of that and seen many of the public figures and significant events on television the night before. Or they will hear on the early morning radio news items which have become news three hours later than the latest possible edition of the morning paper.
The press has been slow to catch on to this change and to revise its methods of operation so that the newspaper still has a function. That it has a function, there can be no doubt: for the television or radio news bulletin is tightly encapsulated, containing only a few of the main facts in a highly abbreviated form.
Newspapers are archives, objects of record. They can be referred to, checked back on, in a way that the television or radio news cannot. They can describe events at greater length, add more relevant detail, give authoritative comment from people in a position to detect trends and the likely lines in which a news story will develop.
But the old concept of a newspaper "scoop", the presentation of a startling hard news story a day before its rivals, is virtually dead-killed by radio and television.
МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Крымский федеральный университет имени В.И. Вернадского»
ТАВРИЧЕСКАЯ АКАДЕМИЯ
Институт иностранной филологии
Кафедра иностранных языков № 2
Разговорная тема
JOURNALISM IS A HARD LIFE
(4 семестр)
What sort of people are journalists? What qualities and qualifications do they possess?
If you accept the picture so often given on the movie or television screen, newspapermen are hard-bitten, rude, hat-wearing, shouting people who unravel crime mysteries, call their editor “Chief”, and seem to have unlimited expenses. Beware of that picture.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary describes a journalist as “one whose business is to edit or write for a public journal”. That's all.
Journalism is a hard life. It can be exciting, but it can be sometimes boring. It can be frustrating too. It can be demanding and so make it difficult or impossible for you to do a lot of things that other people do in their spare time. It can separate you from your family for a great amount of your time; some journalists see their school-going children only at weekends. It can cut you off from a good deal of social life with your friends, and it can make it almost impossible for you to know when you will be free and what time you will have to call your own.
Despite this, those who are journalists can imagine few ways of life that are more rewarding, despite the drawbacks and frustrations of their profession. Most sub-editors, particularly night sub-editors, lead a hard life, shut off from personal contact with the outside world; but many of them have been reporters and have known the thrill of meeting important people and of writing a good story - the excitement of being a journalist.
To be a good journalist you must have a great deal of curiosity. You must like people and be interested in what they do, you must be able to get on easy and friendly terms with men and women of all sorts, however much they may differ from each other or from you Journalism is no place for the shy person who finds it difficult to talk to strangers. He must be able to write, not necessarily at the standard of great writers, but in a simple and lucid fashion and, above ail, quickly, and in short sentences which convey concisely what is meant.
A reporter is responsible to his chief of staff. He is to d to refer matters which involve decisions to the chief of staff.
But the chief of staff is not with him when he is reporting the proceedings of Parliament or some meeting; not with him when he is interviewing an important person; not with him when he is reporting an event involving loss of life, a bushfire or a flood. There the reporter is on his own, with nobody to turn to for advice. There he has to make his own decisions and shoulder responsibility. A good journalist is not easily rebuffed. He must have a good deal of self-reliance and push and energy and initiative.
If you think you can measure up to these standards try to take up journalism as a career.
МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
Федеральное государственное автономное образовательное учреждение высшего образования «Крымский федеральный университет имени В.И. Вернадского»
ТАВРИЧЕСКАЯ АКАДЕМИЯ
Институт иностранной филологии
Кафедра иностранных языков № 2
Разговорная тема