on January 18, 2014
WHAT IS NEWS?
“In the beginning was the word” but since, that ‘word’ has been distorted, disguised, and deemed to deny both the sisterhood of women and the destiny of cannabis. Now the 420Nurses are launching a NEWS site project to correct for that deviation.
News is anything you haven’t heard before that has a verifiable source; otherwise it is gossip, rumor, or innuendo.
News is reported. Since mainline news sources are reliant on mainline advertisers, they are reluctant to cover anything that seems threatening to advertisers and their customers. Their mantra is to attract attention though the motto, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. Our motto is – if it weeds, it leads!
News educates. Therefore besides the current festival, the latest product, which are known as fluff, our job is to straighten out misconceptions and bring our readers up to speed from our viewpoint at the front of the news, aka the news front. Fluff is as important as icing is to cake.
News is made up of 6 parts. Who, what, when, where, why, and how. A news reporter answers all these questions in the filed story report. Your tools for recording this can/should be, a notebook, a camera/person for photos (if applicable), a tape recorder (for catching details), and a strong memory to convey ambiance. After practice, your memory will improve and you will be able to remember the highlights about a story report freeing yourself from carrying equipment that you could lose, or forget.
Today the news is reported by the best staff of professional, college educated thoroughbreds that money can buy, and that is the problem. The solution to obtaining the truth in news has been the coming of the ‘citizen journalist’, an ancient/modern phenomena. Mark from the Bible was one of these, then called a scribe. These people followed around ‘news makers’ and wrote down what was happening right then, so literate people could read the event taking place, rather than hear it like gossip, etc.
This ‘scribe’ style of journalism has been revisited in modern time by two men of some renown. George Plimpton was an Ivy leaguer who named the style ‘participatory’ journalism. The other guy was more like we are going to be, and he graduated my high school in 1955*. His name for the style was ‘gonzo’ journalism and he was Hunter S. Thompson. We are gonzo press. Gonzo means that you are in the story, with the story all around you, but you are not the story**.
We now have our style as writer/reporter, in your face, so to speak, but as news writers, we do a little more than just report the news. Slant and angle are enhancements to stimulate interest in what you are reporting. We are pot smokers and patients, this is OUR house.
Our angle is to show Mary Jane in the best possible light in every situation to remove the stigma many people, and especially women according to a recent article, feel towards the plant cannabis. The slant of each story, or piece, is to show how this is of interest to the reader. Here’s an example.
A car hits a lamp post at 6th and Main. Unless you’re a news addict, then why should this concern you unless you live close to Main or somewhere on 6th. The slant is to show that this accident could tie-up traffic affecting your commute out to the suburbs.
A person demolishing a building causes a collapse killing a number of people. It is reported by the main line news that he tested positive for pot. The illusion is given that the man is stoned and so pot is bad. We all know that a joint smoked on January 1 will be in your system until the 30th with no pot smoked in between. We know it but people outside our culture don’t. Our angle is to show the misconception.
End of Part 2
* - though Thompson graduated, Male High withheld his diploma because of a police dust-up with the local cops.
**- there will be times when you may make the news as a 420Nurses model, and report the story in the first person.
PT420 is PT Rothschild, a news blog writer for Full Value Review/Temecula Calendar for over ten years. He has been published in Temecula’s Neighbors [print], the Valley News [print], and has written Memoirs of Mr. Pete & Mary Jane Green, available on Amazon.com
“In the beginning was the word” but since, that ‘word’ has been distorted, disguised, and deemed to deny both the sisterhood of women and the destiny of cannabis. Now the 420Nurses are launching a NEWS site project to correct for that deviation.
News is anything you haven’t heard before that has a verifiable source; otherwise it is gossip, rumor, or innuendo.
News is reported. Since mainline news sources are reliant on mainline advertisers, they are reluctant to cover anything that seems threatening to advertisers and their customers. Their mantra is to attract attention though the motto, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. Our motto is – if it weeds, it leads!
News educates. Therefore besides the current festival, the latest product, which are known as fluff, our job is to straighten out misconceptions and bring our readers up to speed from our viewpoint at the front of the news, aka the news front. Fluff is as important as icing is to cake.
News is made up of 6 parts. Who, what, when, where, why, and how. A news reporter answers all these questions in the filed story report. Your tools for recording this can/should be, a notebook, a camera/person for photos (if applicable), a tape recorder (for catching details), and a strong memory to convey ambiance. After practice, your memory will improve and you will be able to remember the highlights about a story report freeing yourself from carrying equipment that you could lose, or forget.
Today the news is reported by the best staff of professional, college educated thoroughbreds that money can buy, and that is the problem. The solution to obtaining the truth in news has been the coming of the ‘citizen journalist’, an ancient/modern phenomena. Mark from the Bible was one of these, then called a scribe. These people followed around ‘news makers’ and wrote down what was happening right then, so literate people could read the event taking place, rather than hear it like gossip, etc.
This ‘scribe’ style of journalism has been revisited in modern time by two men of some renown. George Plimpton was an Ivy leaguer who named the style ‘participatory’ journalism. The other guy was more like we are going to be, and he graduated my high school in 1955*. His name for the style was ‘gonzo’ journalism and he was Hunter S. Thompson. We are gonzo press. Gonzo means that you are in the story, with the story all around you, but you are not the story**.
We now have our style as writer/reporter, in your face, so to speak, but as news writers, we do a little more than just report the news. Slant and angle are enhancements to stimulate interest in what you are reporting. We are pot smokers and patients, this is OUR house.
Our angle is to show Mary Jane in the best possible light in every situation to remove the stigma many people, and especially women according to a recent article, feel towards the plant cannabis. The slant of each story, or piece, is to show how this is of interest to the reader. Here’s an example.
A car hits a lamp post at 6th and Main. Unless you’re a news addict, then why should this concern you unless you live close to Main or somewhere on 6th. The slant is to show that this accident could tie-up traffic affecting your commute out to the suburbs.
A person demolishing a building causes a collapse killing a number of people. It is reported by the main line news that he tested positive for pot. The illusion is given that the man is stoned and so pot is bad. We all know that a joint smoked on January 1 will be in your system until the 30th with no pot smoked in between. We know it but people outside our culture don’t. Our angle is to show the misconception.
End of Part 2
* - though Thompson graduated, Male High withheld his diploma because of a police dust-up with the local cops.
**- there will be times when you may make the news as a 420Nurses model, and report the story in the first person.
PT420 is PT Rothschild, a news blog writer for Full Value Review/Temecula Calendar for over ten years. He has been published in Temecula’s Neighbors [print], the Valley News [print], and has written Memoirs of Mr. Pete & Mary Jane Green, available on Amazon.com
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