MEDIA AND INFORMATION LITERACY MODULE 9 DISCUSSION

GENRE

The word genre is a French word which means “kind” or “class”. The original Latin word is “genus”
and means a class of thing that can be broken down into subcategories. Genre tends to be understood to
constitute particular conventions of content and following a distinctive style in terms of form and presentation.

The primary genres that media creators and producers invoke are the following: entertainment, news,
information, education, and advertising.

News
News are stories that have critical importance to community and national life. Like the storytelling of
fictional dramas, news stories are also told following the basic structure of beginning, middle, and end.

The journalists, people trained to report news to an audience, are expected to be objective,
comprehensive, and bias-free. They work for newspapers, radio stations, televisions, and lately, online or web-
based services. Journalists employ various sub-genres in delivering the news. At present, there are five major
divisions of news stories, and they are the following: hard or straight news, feature, soft news, investigate news,
opinion.

Hard news is usually found in the first page of s newspaper or makes up the headline of a regular
episode of primetime news. Hard news values two elements: seriousness and timelines. Seriousness means
topics or issues that are critical to the lives of the community and the body politic. Developments in the political
and economic arena, crime-related events, outbreaks and end of war and the occurrence of the disasters are hard
news. Timeliness, on the other hand, mean stories that cover current events – and the current peace
negotiations, the outbreak of war, a significant public statement issued by a leader or an opinion maker, a
situation appraisal of a current crisis, etc.

Since hard news is considered critical to the life of a community or the entire nation, journalists usually
invoke the notion of objectivity as one of the guiding principles in covering and presenting news stories.
Objectivity is usually considered a fair, balanced, and impartial stance when retelling the events, free of
judgment and without interpretation.

The inverted pyramid seems to be the acceptable structure of the news story that is told objectively –
with the base on top and the narrowest and the pointed section at the bottom. Thus, the lead paragraph opens
with the very general recounting of the story, unpacking the widely acceptable 6 Ws – who was involved, what
happened, where did it happen, why did it happen, when did it happen, how did it happen.

It is also an accepted protocol that if a story is about some conflict, the two opposing sides should be
well-presented. Aside from this, the third person point-of-view is the accepted manner of telling the story.
This only means that the journalist should not be involved in any manner.

Television news reporting, by virtue of the camera, presents a separate set of protocols. The use of the
character generator or chargen, a device that incorporates text in the television screen, is required to introduce
succinctly the gist of a story. The camera-angle should also be eye-level at that very moment the broadcast
journalist is introducing the story to the television audience.

Soft news. If the demands of hard news are too steep, then journalists are able to relax when presenting
soft news. These would include lifestyle news, travel news, articles offering the best way to do something, or
even video clips presenting the point-of-view of ordinary folks. Soft news are also called human interest
stories.
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Features. Feature stories are extensions of soft news in a sense that the human interest angle is played
up and presented in a longer and elaborate format. Most feature stories follow the beginning-middle-end
structure, but the journalists can take liberties as long as clarity is not compromised. There is a desire to take a
more colorful language or innovations in style. The journalist’s perspective is also acceptable. Using established
literary conventions and literary devices are also acceptable styles that add flair to the writing style of the
journalist.

In the United States, the genre has been called literary journalism. It might seem like an oxymoron;
journalism speaks of objectivity and a commitment to standards of accuracy while literary implies enjoying
liberties with language as its defining characteristic.

It can still cover the usual topics such as pressing issues of the day such as trafficking, unemployment,
the reproductive health bill, or the Bangsamoro peace talks. There are factual information stated in the article so
their accuracy and commitment to truth still hold firm. However, the writer delves deeply by engaging her
informants to reveal their complexities and seeks out the nuances of the issue as it bears on the lives and
characters of people. Thus, literary journalism requires more research and more reflection from the writer.

It is also possible that the writer inserts herself into the narrative. His/her own reflections may form part
of the ideas that the articles wants to convey.

Editorials and Opinions. Opinions against hard news are reserved for editorials and opinions. In a
newspaper, they are usually found in at least one page, or perhaps a spread, made up of two pages facing each
other. More commonly called as columns, these opinion articles and editorials express an individual or
organizational point of view. In the case of editorials, it expresses the editorial committee’s stand on a very
specific issue or a specific person or entity. Editorials can serve many purposes.

An editorial can argue for a certain issue and calls on a person or an entity to act on the issue or respond
to the clamor of the citizens. Sometimes, it is also meant to throw adulation to an individual, an organization, a
policy, or an act exercised by the government, and cites why such should be the norm for others to follow.

Sometimes, it is simply meant to entertain, and sometimes, employ the tone of parody to underscore the
misdemeanor of individuals or entities.

It must be clear that while an editorial was written by one or two journalists, it still reflects the majority
vote of the editorial board, the governing body of the newspaper made up of the publishers, the editors of the
different sections, and its business managers. If there are very significant issues confronting the nation, most
media organizations will convene and present to the public what is called a pooled editorial.

Opinion articles, however, reflect the views of the writer or the stand of one organization other than the
media institution that disseminates it.

There are both opinion pieces, one conceptualized and perhaps written collectively and the other written
by an individual.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTS

Investigative reporting has a very specific relation to power because it focuses in finding, reporting,
and presenting news which the authorities try to conceal. Its tools are similar to standard new reporting;
however, it is out to expose wrongdoing, questionable transactions, or shady deals brokered by those in power,
there is the more compelling need to be more in-depth and analytical with the facts that are uncovered in a
MEDIA AND INFORMATION LITERACY MODULE 9 DISCUSSION
process that usually takes longer than conventional news reporting. In contrast to reporting about standard news
which usually takes about a day or two, investigative journalists devote a great amount of time on research and
interviewing in-depth resources.

ADVERTISEMENTS

Advertisements are messages that are created to sell a product or a service. Advertising messages can
either be commercial in nature, information-laden, usually advancing a cause, or an advocacy. There are three
established broad sub-genres of advertising.

1. Hard-sell advertisements are mostly commercial in nature and utilize explicit messages to get the
consumers to purchase a product or patronize a service. A celebrity mother who talks about the latest laundry
detergent as the only solution to the stain-soaked school uniforms her sons bring home after an intense game at
the football field is using a hard-sell approach.

2. Soft-sell advertisements, on the other hand, are associative in nature. A major soda company
associates its product with the happiness derived from family togetherness. A global sports brand into shoes,
apparel, and other sports products invoke a motivational tagline that signifies courage and audacity in the face
of the unknown.

3. Informecial, derived from the words “information” and “commercials,” combine the need to inform
or educate and the intent to sell a product. Advocacy groups use infomercials to send messages campaigning in
behalf of a stand, a position regarding an issue that affects community or the nation. What is being sold is the
advocacy and what is asked from the audience is support or a kind of buy-in to a program, even a movement for
long-term reform.

ENTERTAINMENT

Entertainment derives from the French word entretenir which means “to hold the attention, keep busy,
or amused.” The genre of entertainment programming in the broadcast industries and entertainment news
writing speaks much about how the genre is creatively realized in the current media industry. First, the creation
and production of entertainment is always hinged on the profit-driven motives of media institutions.
Traditionally, news has always been viewed as belonging to the realm of public service and is certainly not a
priority area for generating profits through sales and advertising. Conversely, the entertainment programs are
the area where they generate the profits that should sustain public service programs.

Entertainment then grabs the audience’s attention to present something that will make them comfortably
entertained, while generating pleasurable feelings of being satiated with cumulative effect of the story, the
production numbers, and the visuals. It is not the concern of media creators and producers to transmit valuable
information about society, or to keep them thinking about ideas.

Today, entertainment covers roughly 80% of programs in television, and around 15% of space in a
broadsheet. In fact, structural organizations of major broadcast companies single out the entertainment unit as
distinct from news and public affairs to underscore the distinct nature of entertainment programs and singular
attention it needs.

Turow (2009, 47) identified four sub-genres – festivals, gaming, drama, and comedy. Each of those four
sub-genres can still be broken down into more subcategories as this table illustrates.

GENRE ENTERTAINMENT
Subgenre Festival Drama Gaming Comedy
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Second-level genre Parades Workplace Sports Situation Comedy
Third-level Secular Parades Dramas about Professional Sports Work-based
subgenre professionals sitcoms
Fourth-level Nonrecurring Hospital dramas NFL Football Hospital-based
subgenre secular parades Sitcoms

Entertainment is divided into four sub-genres – festival, gaming, drama, and comedy. Each of these four
were further broken down into subcategories to mark further taxonomic differences, such as subjects of drama
or the kind of sports played. The table is largely based on American television.

INFORMATION

Information is all about the raw material that circulates around us and from where news as another
genre is generated. Information is anything that provides us data about the world. It could be a simple piece of
data or it could be a set of data that say something about an event, a person, a thing, etc.

However, in the context of media and information literacy, information has come to mean the wide and
almost infinite array of materials and texts we encounter in the Internet. Some use pieces of information for our
education or to make our lives better and easier. We have come to gather information as part of our everyday
lives, based on needs that are whether personal or professional. These days, most of the relevant facts we need
are accessed through the Internet.

1. Blogs – for purposes of gaining information literacy, we can classify them into broad categories: blog,
derived from the words web and log, consists of web entries by an individual, displayed in reverse
chronological order, providing a commentary on something, or an articulation of a personal opinion, a
recounting of life’s events, or an elaboration of some concept. When it started out in the late 1990s, most of the
blogs were initiated by individuals.

However, soon some organizations discovered the potency of blogs as information sites for their
activities and platform of advocacies. These blogs are commonly referred to as multi-author blogs (MABS)

Today, there is always a possibility that the readers can interact in the comments section and this has
truly been revolutionary. That is why blogging is also considered a social networking activity as it invites
participants to talk their opinions and insights with the blog authors as well as interact with other readers.

2. Wikis – a wiki is essentially an application that allows the modification, revision, extension,
elaboration sometimes even deletion of its content. The most famous wiki is the Wikipedia, an encyclopedia
project that relies on a global community of users to contribute for content generation, revision, and elaboration.
It differs from blogs because the content has no owner or leader. Wikis serve very broad purposes: as an
information hub, information dissemination, an introduction, an introduction to a topic, and depending on the
popularity of a topic, some can have more elaborate discussions. Wiki writers, aside from being able to create
new pages within the wiki website, can also promote topic associations through hyperlinks that will connect the
readers to another document that can provide more information or elaboration to the topic.

Wikis, by virtue of the highly democratic and participatory process that underpins its creation, are not
materials that have been vetted by experts. Readers who consult wikis should therefore be very discerning. But
there is the rub: those who turn to Wikipedia, for instance, are there to get an introductory level of knowledge
and are therefore unable to distinguish between reliable information and otherwise.

Beyond Wikipedia are wikis scattered all over the Internet, catering to various information needs. The
Wikispaces Classroom describes itself as “a social writing platform for education. We make it incredibly easy
MEDIA AND INFORMATION LITERACY MODULE 9 DISCUSSION
to create a classroom workspace where you and your students can communicate and work on writing projects
alone or in teams.”

ASSESSMENT SHEET IN MEDIA AND INFORMATION LITERACY

Name: ______________________________ Date: ___________________ Score: ____________________

Directions: Read the following statements carefully. Identify what is being described and write your answer on
the space provided before the number.

________________________1. This is essentially an application that allows the modification, revision,

extension, elaboration sometimes even deletion of its content.

________________________2. This is usually found in the first page of s newspaper or makes up the headline
of a regular episode of primetime news.

________________________3. These are extensions of soft news in a sense that the human interest angle is
played up and presented in a longer and elaborate format.

________________________4. These are messages that are created to sell a product or a service.

________________________5. This consists of web entries by an individual, displayed in reverse

chronological order, providing a commentary on something, or an articulation of a personal opinion, a
recounting of life’s events, or an elaboration of some concept.

________________________6. It is all about the raw material that circulates around us and from where news as
another genre is generated.

________________________7. This refers to the combine the need to inform or educate and the intent to sell a
product.

________________________8. These are mostly commercial in nature and utilize explicit messages to get the
consumers to purchase a product or patronize a service.

________________________9. This means stories that cover current events – and the current peace
negotiations, the outbreak of war, a significant public statement issued by a leader or an opinion maker, a
situation appraisal of a current crisis, etc.

________________________10. This means topics or issues that are critical to the lives of the community and
the body politic.