Reporting and Editing I: News Concepts, Determinants and Values, Structure and Perspectives; Reporting for Print, Radio, Television and Digital Media; Types of Reporting; National and International News Agencies and Feature Syndicates; Writing for Each Medium; and Translation and Transcreation

Newsroom practice lists the classic news values: timeliness, proximity (geographical and cultural), prominence of the people involved, consequence or impact, conflict, human interest, and novelty or unusualness. The most cited academic list is Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge's "The Structure of Foreign News" (1965), a study of how Norwegian newspapers covered crises in the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus. They proposed twelve news factors: frequency (an event that fits the news cycle), threshold (size), unambiguity, meaningfulness (cultural proximity and relevance), consonance (fitting expectations), unexpectedness, continuity (a running story), composition (balance of the news mix), reference to elite nations, reference to elite persons, personification, and negativity. The more factors an event satisfies, the likelier it is to become news.

Tony Harcup and Deirdre O'Neill revisited the list against British newspapers in 2001 and again in 2017, when social media had changed selection. Their 2017 list includes exclusivity, bad news, conflict, surprise, audio-visuals, shareability, entertainment, drama, follow-up, the power elite, relevance, magnitude, celebrity, good news and the news organisation's own agenda. Shareability is the new factor: a story's chance of being spread on social platforms now influences whether it is covered and how it is packaged.

The inverted pyramid puts the most important facts first and the least important last, so that a story can be cut from the bottom without losing its essentials and a reader who stops early still has the news. It is usually traced to the telegraph era of the nineteenth century, when correspondents sent the essentials first in case the line failed. The lead, or intro, answers as many as possible of the five Ws and one H: who, what, when, where, why and how. A summary lead does this directly; an anecdotal lead opens with a scene; a delayed lead withholds the main point for a sentence or two; a question lead or a quotation lead is used sparingly.

The nut graf is the paragraph, usually second to fourth in a feature-style story, that states why the story matters now. Attribution tells the reader where each claim came from; quotations should add voice or evidence, not repeat what the reporter has already said. Sources are on the record (named), on background (used but not named), or off the record (not to be published), and an embargo is an agreement not to publish information before a set time, as with budgets and scientific papers.

Print allows depth, detail, figures and re-reading, so the print reporter can use complex sentences and data, though the discipline of the lead still applies. Radio is for the ear: one idea per sentence, conversational language, active voice, round numbers, attribution before the claim ("Police say three people died"), and no reliance on the listener remembering a name from an earlier sentence. Television writes to pictures: the words should add what the images cannot show, and the reporter's piece to camera (PTC), interviews (sound bites) and visuals must be planned together. Digital reporting is continuous and multimedia: breaking news goes out as alerts and live blogs, then is updated, linked, embedded with video, documents and social posts, and optimised so that search engines and readers can find it.

• Beat reporting: a reporter covers a fixed area such as police, courts, municipal affairs, health or a ministry, and builds sources in it.
• Investigative reporting: original, sustained inquiry into wrongdoing someone wants concealed, using documents, records and multiple sources.
• Interpretative and in-depth reporting: background, analysis and context around an event.
• Precision journalism: social-science methods such as surveys and statistics applied to reporting, named by Philip Meyer in Precision Journalism (1973); today's data journalism is its descendant.
• Citizen journalism and explanatory journalism: reports by non-professionals, often via mobile phones, and pieces that explain complex subjects step by step.

A news agency gathers news and sells it to subscribing newspapers, broadcasters and websites, which cannot keep correspondents everywhere. Agencies supply breaking news, photographs, video, data and features, and because they serve clients of every political view they developed the neutral, factual style of wire copy. A feature syndicate distributes non-news material, columns, cartoons, comic strips, puzzles and features, to many publications at once, as King Features Syndicate did in the United States from the 1910s and Project Syndicate does for opinion columns today. In India the Indian News and Feature Alliance (INFA), founded by the journalist Durga Das, was an early feature and news service.

India's first agency, the Associated Press of India, was founded by K. C. Roy in 1905 and later controlled by Reuters, which is why the Press Trust of India, formed by Indian newspapers, took it over when it began operations in 1949. During the Emergency the four national agencies, PTI, UNI, Hindustan Samachar and Samachar Bharati, were merged into one agency called Samachar in 1976; they were separated again in 1978.

The shared rules of news writing are accuracy, brevity and clarity: short sentences, concrete nouns and active verbs, one idea per paragraph, attribution for every claim that is not common knowledge, and no adjectives that judge. Print can hold a sentence of twenty-five words; broadcast copy aims shorter, is read aloud to test it, spells out numbers and difficult names for the presenter, and avoids sentences that begin with a subordinate clause. Digital copy is scanned more than read: eye-tracking studies by the Nielsen Norman Group (2006) found an F-shaped pattern, so the key words go at the start of headings and paragraphs, text is broken by subheadings, and headlines state the news plainly so that they work in search results and social feeds.

Translation renders a text from one language into another, keeping its meaning as faithfully as possible. Indian newsrooms translate constantly: agency copy in English becomes a Hindi or Marathi story, a minister's Hindi speech becomes an English report, and errors in translating a quotation can change its meaning and create legal risk. Transcreation, a blend of translation and creation, recreates a message for a new language and culture, keeping its intent, tone and emotional effect rather than its words. It is used above all in advertising and campaign communication, where a slogan or joke that works in one language would fall flat or offend if translated word for word; a news report should be translated, while an advertising headline is usually transcreated.