With an objective to inculcate critical thinking and preparing students for the professional world, a three-day workshop was organized by the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, FMeH on “Beginners’ Netiquette and Writing” recently. The workshop was conducted by Mr Pradeep Bagchi, Senior Editor, Times of India & Ms Jayalakshmi Sengupta, Editor, Niyogi Publications.

Mr. Bagchi said, “One always hears a journalist ‘’filing a story.” A story is nothing but a structured content- a content that emanates from clarity of thought and data. The craft of writing has undergone a change with the advent of 24×7 news channels. From the concept of 5Ws and 1H, the style of writing has changed into narratives both for hard news and soft news”. “However, the story has to be made appealing. The focus is on making the reader visualize the story by giving a human face to it,” explained Mr Bagchi.

The workshop dwelled deep into the techniques, style and format of writing a new story both for print and news channels. Both the experts spoke at length on formats like PTG (particular to general) and PPF (present, past and future) while writing a news story. The format of PTG and PPF form a critical part of news writing today.

Mr Bagchi also explained the relevance of concepts like Diamond script and PVR i.e preview, view and review which form the hallmark of storytelling and are widely used in both print and TV news.

Various exercises were undertaken by Ms. Sengupta and a session on writing about “Love” was conducted. Students were asked to write their understanding of the concept of love. All the students wholeheartedly participated in the session and their views were equally shared and discussed by the experts.

The experts gave live examples and shared interesting anecdotes while explaining serious concepts like writing ‘lead’ for hard news. Mr Bagchi elaborated that while writing, the first hindrance comes in the form of how and where to begin. “It is like learning to drive a car. Till one does not learn to start and change into the first gear, one can’t learn to drive the car. Learning to write is also the same.”

It was very fruitful session for every participant.