PART 2. COLLECTING & DISSEMINATING

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· Before you read

· Discuss with your partner

ü How do you usually get your daily news? Do you read newspapers to get the news? Why? Why not? Describe the main advantages and disadvantages of your favourite news source.

ü Where does your favourite news source get the news from?

ü Are you sure that the news you read (watch) is trustworthy? Is it important for you to get reliable information? Why? Why not?

ü What global news agencies do you know? Are any og them working in your country?

· Study the information box below

AP

Mark Twain once said: “There are only two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe: the sun in heaven and the Associated Press down here”.

In Twain's time, the way to get news out was through the Associated Press, and it still is. In the twenty-first century, AP news stories reach more than one billion people every day, in print, broadcast, or online.

AP traces its lineage to 1846, when the telegraph first reached New York City. He service evolved after a series of meetings at which newspapers agreed to cooperate in the telegraph transmission of news.

Cooperation was a radical departure for the belligerent New York press. Newspapers competed aggressively, sometimes violently, to be the first with news. The telegraph revolutionized the race. Beginning in 1844, the old ways of competing to get the news – by boat, pony express, and carrier pigeons – combined with the new: getting copy to the nearest telegraph office.

After the outbreak of the Mexican war in 1846, the race for news focused on that front. Moses Yale Beach of the Sun, New York City's largest-selling newspaper, set up a pony express relay to race war news northward from New Orleans to Montgomery, where news copy was put on the great Southern Mail stagecoaches for delivery to the southernmost telegraph point. The Beach's express seems to have triggered the early AP. Although his method guaranteed the Sun a twenty-four-hour beat on war news, Beach decided to share it with his rivals, as an element of a more comprehensive cooperative scheme. He called the publishers of the other New York City papers to the office, and five publishers came.

They met at the Sun in mid 1846, as partners of necessity, not friends. Moses Beach proposed to his guests to share the benefits and costs of the telegraph transmission of the news. But his vision went beyond that, to the joint gathering of all telegraphic news from out of town. This was the beginning of the Associated Press.

In 1851, Daniel H. Craig, one of the AP founders, wrote: “All shall contribute to the expense and trouble of collecting and transmitting all important news the wish being to raise the standard of telegraphic reports to make them what they ought to be, reliable for accuracy, and the medium through which all really important and interesting news shall be placed before the public with the utmost dispatch”. Although the language has changed, this remains AP's blueprint.

The AP developed the style of news writing that shaped modern journalism.

Washington agent Lawrence Gobright's story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, for example, spent two hundred words on the president's theater party before getting to the fact that he had been shot. Not only was this style of reporting dull, but telegraph tolls made it expensive. In 1883, New England AP agents were instructed to put the vital news first and add the worthy detail later, if any.

Get the news, put the right lead on, and file it for the wire.

This 'lead first, details later' writing style is taught as the inverted pyramid, and emphasizes five Ws of news: who, what, when, where and why.

As the technology changed the delivery of news, the world of competing wire services has changed, too. In 1972, computers went into service for writing, editing, and transmitting AP's national news, supplanting typewriters and Teletypes.

There were also fewer newspapers to serve. The big city evening newspapers that once dominated had fallen, one by one, to new lifestyles and television competition. More and more Americans were either watching their news on TV or reading it on the Internet. There was no less competition to be first with the news, but the arena has dramatically changed.

Historically, AP has been a newspaper-driven service. In a new era, every second is a deadline for news that can be flashed instantly and globally to users who want it immediately.

But no twenty-first century technology can alter one basic AP tradition: its devotion to accurate, objective news coverage. AP's imprint of accuracy and fairness is as vital in the murky world of online fact or fiction as it was long ago, when rival press lords bent the truth. Created to take advantage of the newly invented telegraph, AP has confronted all succeeding revolutions in the news technology. Still a newspaper-owned cooperative, still dedicated to communicating facts, AP has become an international news network for the new age.

(Walter R. Mears, ‘A brief history of Associated Press’)

· Having read the text

· Choose the best answer to the following questions:

1. According to the text

a. The Associated Press Agency used to be very important

b. Mark Twain considered the Associated Press Agency to be very important

c. More than one billion people received information from the Associated Press Agency in the time of Mark Twain.

1. The word lineagein the third passage means

a. direct descent from an ancestor

b. very long line

c. ages that have already passed

1. The word departure in the fourth passage means

a. leaving to start a journey

b. a deviation from a traditional course of action or thought

c. the amount of a ship's change of longitude

1. Moses Yale Beach called the publishers of the other New York City papers to the office because

a. He wanted to improve the system of news gathering and dissemination

b. He wanted to guarantee the Sun a twenty-four-hour beat on war news

c. He wanted to make friends with the publishers of the other New York City papers

1. Washington agent Lawrence Gobright's story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination

a. Mainly described the president's theater party

b. Was extremely long

c. Was written in the old-fashioned manner

1. According to the ‘inverted pyramid’ is

a. an architectural whim

b. a metaphor used by journalists and other writers to illustrate the placing of the most important information first within a text

c. a list of questions asked and answered in an article

1. In the last passage of the text the author implies that

a. not all the news on the Internet are trustworthy

b. accuracy has become less important with the advent of the Internet

c. AP has lost much of its importance due to the internet

· Discuss the following questions

1. What does the author tell us about the situation with news transmission in New York in 1846?
2. What important event took place in 1844? Why was this event so important?
3. What do we learn about the Mexican War from the text? Why did this event become an important landmark in the history of AP?
4. What does the author call ‘AP's blueprint’? Why?
5. What makes Lawrence Gobright's story of Abraham Lincoln's assassination unusual for the modern reader?
6. What does the slogan 'lead first, details later' mean? Give your own examples to illustrate your explanation.
7. What change occurred in AP around 1972? Do you think that this change was as important as that of the 1844? Why? Why not?
8. What does the author mean when he writes that AP has been a newspaper-driven service?
9. What basic AP tradition does the author mention in the text?

· Focus on vocabulary

Note:

A good English-to-English dictionary is indispensable when learning new vocabulary. Understanding the basic meaning of unfamiliar new words is not enough – you have to be able to use them in appropriate contexts and collocations. Highlight useful new words so that they stand out whenever you flip through the book. This will help you to assimilate the words so that eventually you can incorporate them into your active vocabulary.

If a word or phrase seems specialized, obscure or recondite, you should not necessarily try to remember it – often you can guess its meaning from the context. Make your own choices about whether new words and phrases are useful or not”.

Leo Jones, “Progress to proficiency”

Work with your dictionary. Write out and learn the definitions of the following words (the first one is given as an example). Lines 11-18 are left for the words and phrases you consider to be worth highlighting and remembering.

· Focus on important terms

ü Study the content of the box

ü Find and highlight the words from the box in the text. Study the way they are used in the story.

ü Rewrite the following sentences:

1. The main topic of her articles is the work of local schools. She ______ ________________________________________________________

2. Our work at this article is to be finished by the 25 of October. The 25 of October_ _________________________________________________________________

3. They decided that this work must be done by the 6 of November. They ________

_________________________________________________________________

4. They were late with this article. He _____________________________

5.

Date: 2016-01-05; view: 2404