hi I'm Andrew and I'm Dave and we're the IB English guys today we want to talk about hard news and journalism and how to read a news article so important we think this is a great text type we thought it was really important to to put this on our website and to talk about to talk about new yeah that's interesting Mr G sometimes in our IB assessments we're not going to get something that's full of bias we're not going to get something that you know has a definite opinion sometimes you just get something kind of vanilla in thinking about that National Geographic assessment last year sometimes we got to just take and learn how to work with what we're given yeah and again news is meant to inform the public about events and situations let's talk about the idea of hard news hard news means the news and the articles that are about consequential important significant events that we see might be in politics it might be a world event it might be a natural disaster this is what a news article is doing it's informing us soft news is the more entertainment celebrity these are these are soft news lifestyle and just like any other text type A Hard news artic does have specific conventions does have specific attributes and if you can look for these and understand what to write about you can be very successful with this text type yeah Mr chares when I look say it's assessment day I'm looking at a hard news article what's the metacognitive process during my five minutes of a reading time what do I need to be thinking about during those five minutes of reading time that's great I'm going to pull one from our friend Rich wer he likes to ask questions so we want to think about what are the questions we want to ask one question is who made this article who wrote this article and how credible is this source like that how incedible you want to think about who's the intended audience of this article what publication this come from and who are they aiming at obviously when was this written and where is this from that's important how is this written what are you thinking about in terms of how is this written um what are your thoughts there what are the moves that the writer made how did they put this together how did they order things again these are the choices that they make what is being reported here what is the what are the basic facts what that's being reported yeah I love this question you have to ask what is missing we all know about bias bi Omission right so we need to ask ourselves what's missing in this article and then lastly where do we go from here you know what's is there anything I do with this are they telling me to do something is there an action they're asking me to take these are some questions you need to be thinking about and asking yourself while you're looking at a hard news article okay so let's talk about features and conventions of hard news article so we want to think about what are the qualities and features of of hard news one is the timeliness that again this is ripped out of the headlines of today that the timeliness of the article right I like that important we want to think about objectivity right you know if it's a middle you know the news article should not have inherent bias in there it may have that you know depending on what news agency you're looking at but a true hard news article that's meant purely to inform should be objective and not have bias like that's right that's the ideal that that that journalists want to strive for they don't always they don't always make the idea they also want to strive for accuracy they want to have accurate facts and accurate information so we want to make sure that if we're writing a hard news article that were factually correct yeah you want to think about clarity as well uh very precise word choice writers are under a hard word count so we're thinking about the specific diction that's been Incorporated in why they've chosen those words okay some of the technical features we know that our news article has a headline the headline should be informative it should be accurate and it should reflect the content of the actual article itself yeah headlines tell a lot and then once you get past the headline you're going to have the lead and that's where you're going to find your five W question that who what when where why how of news stories that's typically loaded up structurally in the first paragraph that's right and that leads to the next feature which is this inverted pyramid what that means is that the most significant facts and information is presented at the beginning and then the less significant facts and the more detailed it's at as towards the end you know why you know why that's at the end Mr Giles because most people never make it to the end right we skim and we scan articles all the time uh we think about attribution as well you're going to find a wide range of quoted material in there and who are we attributing those quotes to who are these people are they credible uh and you can think about that in conjunction with objectivity we have witnesses and experts and sources and all those things we want to have we again neutral language we're looking for neutral and objective language when we're writing news articles right that's the again but we also want to be cautious in looking out for opinionated language do we see can we detect any nuances where there is an opinion hiding there some news agencies will slip that in there and that's when they start deviating to the left or the right uh in terms of where they lie yeah that's right we know that there's a spectrum so we want to look for those things so again we want to look at a at a sample a sample news article and again the IB if they're talking about an IB exam they're going to they're not going to present us with a political something that's politically sensitive but they they I think news articles will definitely show up so this news article is about an Australian bushire in Tasmania and again F wildfires and fires are often in let's face that are in the news frequently right yeah and the guiding question that the IB assigned to this textt was how did the visuals and language work together to inform the reader okay language uh visuals and language really standard question guys we're always thinking about the interplay between text and image when we have a multimodal text so this is what we're going to do in this instance as well that's right and we want to also notice that this is an online news article so it's not you know something that was printed in a print uh newspaper this is an online text and again we know online texts have lots of links and lots of um textual features that are that are embedded in that that's important to J what you say we take about 3 minutes and just talk about some of the major things we noticed in the text students you can click on the link below and read this text on your own this one's really hard to project so we're just going to talk about some of the elements and then we'll come back for another video and give you a sample resp spots what yeah that's great I might start with the headline just going up to the headline and just think about this idea of thousands thousands stranded as fires devastate Tasmania just what we talked about the headline gives very clear indication of the the main idea of the article again we got some strong language like devate yeah yeah stranded this is again what the article is about yeah I think you also want to think about sort of that sidebar Mr Giles where I see a bunch of Twitter uh a bunch of tweets right and I think that's really interesting because obviously the news article is written at a specific point in time we can't go back and update that we can but then we have to make a note it's kind of a pain for the the news agency to do that but those Twitter feeds are going to be updated and running and that's where you're going to be able to find the latest tweets and most current information really clever by the news agency to do that you hit a word I think really important for this text is that is like current there's a sense of immediacy and a sense of present danger in this article right and it's that timeliness that we talked about that's important another visual that I think is important to to note and again this is part of the online nature is that there's a photo gallery it's not just one photograph Mr Giles there's 61 photos in this photo gallery if they why why 61 photos they want to capture again how widespread this fire is and to really just inform the reader about the different features of the fire different the one that they've actually featured right I mean you would want to talk about the composition of that the the oppressive nature of the smoke the bright fire like I would be really talking about this key Visual and what that does emotionally for the reader yeah there's another visuals that cutout map of Tasmania the whole map of Tasmania where the map is then highlighted to show us where in Tasmania the fire is that's informing the viewer but we also have the second map the second I like the Google Map a lot right we're all using Google technology Google Maps in our daily lives and for me when I I see those pins inserted in there that makes me want to click on that pin I can get the the coordinates if I'm going to travel in Tasmania I can purposely avoid that I think the Google Map is critical because it makes the text interactive yeah that's right you know and then just ask it's inviting the reader to interact to click they want you to spend more time talk about implications yeah that's right they want you to spend a lot of time there so they're making clickable things for you to stay on their platform that's right and the L the the text itself is very rich is it's very informative again this is not this is a this is a text that's aiming to inform the public about an ongoing fire that present tense is all over the text and again this idea that the the lead is telling us that people are stranded they're cut off from communication this is that this is the story yeah the story actually when I get into the lead and as I'm working down that inverted pyramid Mr Jaws I actually feel quite upset and uncomfortable at the beginning but I feel like there's hope at the end can you talk about that a little bit Yeah they quote a a again A Fire Authority that talks about the fact that you know they're they're working to contain the fire and that that we need to remain Vigilant we need to stay vigilant but again there's a sense of like somebody's you know lots of people are taking action to fight the fire and that that gives us a sense of you know but there is a sense of urgency and and this out of control fire is is a worry so they want to inform the public like be careful and and uh watch where you where you are terms of writing you want to look at those sources as well you want to think about who are who are these quotes attributed to are they reliable what kind of language did they use I want to write about those quotes as well and think about the impact on the audience yeah what else are you going to write about Mr Jaws before we go to that answer yeah I think I'm I'm again I exactly what you said I'm I'm going to be thinking about the the language of urgency the language of danger that's that's that's that's mentioned um throughout the text and and also just some of the details about specific locations and conditions of the fire there's a lot of of names of places and cities because again that's what they're trying to inform the reader so hey if I have a family member there or if I live in that area that's helping inform me yeah that's what news is supposed to do folks in closing I want to say that it when you look at a news article you may think to yourself wow there's it's kind of boring it's kind of dry but hey this is what they're serving this is what we have to e okay so we're going to think about what are the implications what's the subtext what's inferred what can we you know what's implied we'll come back and look at a student answer uh next video and we'll talk about how the student took on this challenge okay but we have to remember there's not always going to be a clear opinion a clear main claim sometimes we have to dig a little bit and hard news is one of those cases so we'll see you in the next video where we discuss an answer all right guys