VIVEKANANDA COLLEGE
THAKURPUKUR
KOLKATA-700063
NAAC ACCREDITED ‘A’ GRADE
Topic: Interpretative reporting
Course Title: Reporting and Editing
Paper: CC- 2 -3
Unit: 3
Semester: 2
Name of the Teacher: Sumana Saha Das
Name of the Department: Journalism and Mass
communication
Interpretative Reporting :
Interpretative reporting interprets facts. Reporter tries to
balance the writing with reasons and meanings of a
development. Reporter provides the information along with
an interpretation of its significance. He uses his knowledge
and experience to offer the reader an idea of the background
of an event and explain the results it could led to.Besides his
own knowledge and research, the reporter also takes the
opinions of specialists to support the report.
According to Curtis D. MacDongall, author of book
Interpretation Reporting, the first important inputs to
interpretative reporting was provided by World War-I.
When the First World War broke out, most Americans
were taken by surprise. They were unable to explain its
causes. This resulted in changes in the style of reporting. In
1939, when the Second World War started, an
overwhelming majority of the Americans expected it or at
least knew it was possible.
MacDongall says an interpretative reporter is aware of the
fact that a news item is not an isolated incident, but an
inevitable link to a chain of important events. An
interpretative. reporter cannot succeed if he is hampered by
prejudices and stereotyped attitudes, which would bias his
perception of human affairs. Interpretative reporting thus
goes behind the news, brings out the hidden significance.
The interpretative news writer puts the event in its context.
By putting an event in context, we mean that the
interpretative writer’s job is to place the news event in the
stream of cause and effect. An event that is isolated for news
story is plucked from a larger cycle or stream of related
events. The interpretative story puts the news back into this
cycle or stream. Interpretative reporting often come in the
form of articles, sometimes in the form of columns called
news analyses, which ever the form these write ups give the
causes and consequences of events.
The interpretative writer reads the fine print of news story in
order to answer the readers’ question: what does it mean?
He writes to keep the news events in focus by showing its
comparative importance. He not only writes about: what’s
going on? He goes beyond this to ask and answer the
question: what does it mean? He knows that nothing just
happens without antecedents and other surrounding
circumstances. He looks for news beyond the spot news.
Deadpan reporting of events, even when the source is
reputable and newsworthy, may be misleading to the extent
that the event doesn’t give the readers the “whole” or
“essential” truth. The interpretative report makes up for the
weaknesses of dead pan reporting.
Readers demand, today, more than drab objective reporting
following the five W’s and H. they demand contextual
reporting expanded beyond the five W’s and H.
The reporter of today must therefore prepare himself to
meet the increasing need and demand for “subsurface” or
“depth” reporting, to take the reader behind the scenes of
the day’s events and activities, relate the news to the reader’s
own framework and experience, make sense out of facts, put
factual news in perspective, print out significance of current
events, put meaning into the news, and so on.
Interpretative writing therefore covers a diversity of format
that are commonly described as depth reports, a term that
gained general acceptance after Neale Copple of the
University of Nebraska published a book called “Depth
Reporting” in 1964. Copple defined depth as the opposite
of deadline dictated superficiality. Copple swept aside a lot
of semantics over interpretation, feature writing,
backgrounding and investigative reporting and says that we
can as well forget about these categories; depth reporting
includes them all.
Depth means thorough, explanatory or descriptive
reporting. It requires an investigative attitude, a lot of hard
work and the ability to tell a story in terms of what it means
to the reader. The depth report may be as long as a
magazine article, or even longer, but it lacks the subjectivity
so often found in magazine, articles or editorials and other
opinion columns.
In conclusion, interpretative writing is a term that suggests a
detailed perspective well beyond the basic facts of the
traditional news story. The interpretive story interprets by
adding detailed information and authority to the news.
When carried out with competence and grace, it shows
readers, through the benefit of evidence, rather than telling
them what to think.
