Form, Style and Journalistic Strategies an Introduction

Form and style matter in journalism. To a large extent a newspaper’s identity is determined by its appearance and its tone. Readers want to feel comfortable with a paper’s design, its departmentalization and its use of illustrations, colour and headlines. The style of writing and the form of stories should please them. ‘Reading someone else’s newspaper is like sleeping with someone else’s wife’, Malcolm Bradbury observed in his novel Stepping Westward. ‘Nothing seems to be precisely in the right place, and when you find what you are looking for, it is not clear then how to respond to it’. People need to be at ease with their newspapers or they risk alienation. The use of conventions of form and style is not however, simply a question of identity and outward appearance. While the content of news changes every day, form and style assure the ritual function of news. Both are essential in making people believe events are real. Journalism is a performative discourse which aims to impose and legitimize valid representations of the social world. The process of gathering, selecting and presenting news is mostly based on unnoticed and undisputed conventions and professional routines. Firstly, these principles and practices determine which parts of reality are represented in the media – in other words, which facts fit the form. Secondly, the form chosen determines how news is framed – the same facts can be used to construct many diverse stories. Michael Schudson argues that the power of journalism mainly lies in its ability to provide the forms in which things are declared to be true. Conventions of form and style determine, therefore, which stories are told and how they are told. By doing so they determine how we experience the world. Schudson speaks in this respect of the politics of narrative form. Studying the emergence and historical development of form and style conventions deepens our understanding of how journalism works. It shows