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| Theme - Journalism jargons |
Some stories, especially of the important, breaking news variety, are not an end in themselves. There are one or many follow-up stories. That is because the original event, on which the story was based, has far-reaching impact and therefore there are multiple developments that follow it, yielding follow-up stories.
Imagine a bank heist. How big the story would be, depends on how big was the amount of money lost. If it was of a high order, then one can imagine many follow-ups ranging from whose heads are rolling for the slackness in the security setup to the progress of investigations.
Another example is when the government announces changes in the tax structure, there would be many reports on how the impact of the changes would play out.
All follow-ups aren't easy because all the subsequent events might not be in the public domain, and therefore, it might require some amount of leg work and investigation by the journalist to find out happened.
There are follow-up stories not only when there are subsequent developments, but also when there aren’t any. You might wonder how. The fact that there aren’t developments itself might be newsy enough. Like, if there hasn’t been any headway in the investigations into the big bank heist.
There are also cases when a particular media organisation runs an exclusive story. The other publications, which missed the original story, do their own follow-ups. So, here it's not essentially about any subsequent events, but it's about other perspectives of the story which have not been written about.
(This post is a part of the "Blogging from A to Z Challenge April 2019".)
Follow up is essential to keep the readers informed.
ReplyDeleteThanks Rajan for the comments.
DeleteAnd reader interest would be reason enough for follow ups, I would imagine.
ReplyDeleteYes, Liz. Reader interest stories will have immediate and multiple followups.
DeleteFollow ups require more work and greater thoroughness to keep readers interested, I think.
ReplyDelete@Nilanjana:
ReplyDeleteYes, that is right. The writer has to look for a new and interesting angle to make the followup worthwhile. Thanks.
Follow ups too have an expiry date it seems.If the courts take a decade to pronounce a judgement things fade out from our memory.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Indu for the comments. Yes, many issues fade out of our memory, until something startling happens to bring them back to centre stage.
ReplyDelete