News analysis

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News analysis interprets information that is usually conveyed in hard news articles. These articles contain some data: statistics, experts’ opinions, they give more details about the event, background information.

Qualities:

• go beyond pure facts

• explain events and put them into context

• have a direction but based on a facts

• they must be informative and balanced

Objectivity and balance are essential:

• no personal opinion

• items reported must be facts

• facts must be credited to sources

• analysis and should be based on these facts

• If you quote a source putting forward one opinion, there must be an opposing view put forward by another source.

Details:

• Time critical: mention when in the 1st or 2nd paragraphs

• Written in the third person

• short sentences and paragraphs

• often one sentence per paragraph

• 25 words max (20 for a lead) per sentence

• sometimes longer in features

• one idea per paragraph

• not dogmatic (just making it easier to read)

• avoiding the "wall of text" (esp. online)

• precise dates (not "last week" but "on July 15")

• inverted pyramid style: most important facts at the top, least important at the bottom

The following example shows the succession of information in news analysis. Inside the pyramid the information stream can have various forms, but the most efficient is the following:

Lead based on the recent fresh information

1-3 paragraphs, which develop the lead

giving more detailed information

Background story, which connects

the facts with the events that took

place earlier and demonstrates

their social importance

Additional information

on further development

of the events

Sentence length: no longer than 25 words

Paragraph length: one or two sentences in the initial summary paragraphs (1 & 2); later paragraphs can be three of four sentences

Article length: 700-900 words

Is legalising drugs the only answer?

Some top police officers are now backing the idea that hard drugs should be decriminalised. Is this a brave but foolhardy idea, asks Tim Luckhurst

Since large-scale heroin trafficking began in the late 1980s, the impact has been devastating. One study puts the costs of drug addiction at more than £2 billion per year. The toll in human misery includes countless acts of street prostitution and children who witness food money injected into mummy’s veins.

Drug enforcement rarely catches the men police call "Mr. Big." The criminal bosses are rarely caught. A senior member of a Scottish police drug squad once described to me "our typical Big Man". He lives in an expensive home in one of the affluent* suburbs of a Scottish city. There are matching "his and hers" Mercedes cars on the drive. His children attend private schools and shop in designer stores where they pay in cash.

Street dealers get caught. But they say little about their source of supply. Mr. Big has friends on both sides of the prison wall. He can afford to regard his couriers and dealers as dispensable assets. There are thousands more begging to be recruited.

Faced with this knowledge, some frontline officers* attending last week’s national conference of the Scottish Police Federation demanded the legalisation of hard drugs. They proposed a licensing scheme that would make drugs available to addicts under controlled circumstances. Inspector Jim Duffy of Strathclyde Police said: "We are not winning this war or anywhere close to it. The status quo is not an option. If the current rules of engagement do not change we are destined to continue to fail."

Until recently the legalisation of hard drugs was associated almost exclusively with radical libertarianism. It is a measure of just how deep-seated Scotland’s drug problem has become that it is now being heard from police officers.

The logic is superficially compelling. Supporters argue that criminalising addictive substances has had the same effect as America’s experiment with prohibition of alcohol. Instead of limiting consumption it has delivered the trade into the hands of criminals. They become rich by meeting a demand that can never be entirely eradicated and which is in their interests to expand. Legalisation, say supporters, would get rid of the gangs and ensure the purity of drugs.

Converts to the cause tend to become evangelical, often moving on to assert that it would eradicate criminality all the way back to the opium fields and coca plantations.

The criminal gangs could choose to undercut the state price. Or they could respond by selling more potent versions of the drugs addicts crave. History suggests gangs tend to diversify. People-smuggling is already taking a grim toll among young women from eastern Europe. Legalising drugs would put rocket boosters under that repulsive trade in slave prostitutes.

Legalisation is not the catch-all solution proponents imagine, but there remains a possibility that it might dent the drugs trade more than endless efforts to catch other Mr Bigs who run operations more sophisticated than Gorman’s. It is a debate worth having, although proponents of legalisation might perhaps care to note that Dutch politicians who pioneered some of the most liberal drugs laws in Europe are now seeking to tighten them after discovering that liberalisation was leading to increased drug usage.