Nick Sheridan - Breaking News: How to Tell Whats Real From Whats Rubbish

Newsflash: I Loved ItEoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl

Breaking News

How to Tell Whats Real From Whats Rubbish

Nick Sheridan

Real-life news journalist!

Newsflash: I loved it.

Eoin Colfer, author of Artemis Fowl

A perfect read for any budding young journalists out there.

Konnie Huq, BBC Blue Peter presenter and author of the Cookie! series

Jam-packed with fascinating facts, this is a fantastically funny and much-needed guide to navigating the news.

Rashmi Sirdeshpande, author of Dosh

For my parents

If youve picked up this book, then Im guessing youre already curious about the world of news . Or perhaps youve stumbled across a copy in a bus station. If so, please return it to my publisher, along with the half-eaten egg-and-cress sandwich that Ive been using as a bookmark.

Im Nick Sheridan and Im a journalist. In fact, you could say that Ive been a journalist since the age of eleven when I started my own newspaper, the Daily Font, where I was Editor-in-Chief, Publisher, News Reporter, Sports Correspondent, Weatherman, Columnist, Lawyer, Receptionist, Canteen Chef and Cleaner. Due to funding cuts I was eventually forced to sack every member of staff and finally myself.

Now Im an actual journalist and I love my job, but lets face it, news can be tricky to navigate. At best it can be interesting, illuminating and uplifting, like the story of the schoolboy who was rescued after falling into an eight-ton lasagne at a local food festival, but more often than not, news can be hard to understand , bewildering or even a bit upsetting .

And then theres , some of which is funny and entertaining, some the complete opposite. Fake News has existed since the dawn of time. Ancient rulers made up rude stories about their enemies, and kings forced painters to make them look more dashing and handsome than they actually were. But in the modern world, we have endless amounts of information at our fingertips. That means theres an even greater risk of falling for Fake News.

As a journalist, its my job to cut through the noise and make sure the truth is heard. So, if you want to take a peek behind the headlines, find out from a real-life journalist how news works, how to sniff out the best stories and how to tell the fact from the phoney then youve picked up the right book.

Breaking News will help you to become a well-informed super-savvy consumer of information , satisfy your curiosity about how stories get made, teach you how to write like a journalist and, if you want to follow in my footsteps, show you how to become one!

If that doesnt sound like much fun to you, then this is your last chance to back out. Once you turn this page, it will be too late.

Still here? Good! Lets get going.

Nick Sheridan

Like any skill pole-vaulting, pottery, mimicking the calls of various farmyard animals the best thing to do is to learn the basics first.

So its time to roll up your sleeves and

If I was to be a bit of a smarty-pants and try to show off some fancy words, Id tell you that this is the definition of news (try not to doze off halfway through reading the sentence as sentences go, its an extremely boring one):

The investigation, collation and publication of new events and data to the general public, with the aim of disseminating information for the advancement of a democratic, transparent and informed society.

THUNK! I actually fell asleep while writing that sentence and whacked my face on the keyboard.

Now that Ive managed to get most of the swelling down on my forehead, let me show you a magic trick.

What if I told you that I could delete all but ONE word from the definition above and it would still tell you what news is.

Think I can pull it off? WATCH ME.

[Redacted X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X] new [Redacted X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X]

No matter how many different words we use to describe what news is, it can be summed up using one simple word: new. Its a story about something that just happened.

It could be the story of me having to plug my nose with tissue paper after I whacked it on my keyboard. Thats something thats just happened, which makes it new and therefore news .

News is like oxygen, water and sand in your trousers after a long picnic on the beach: youll find it pretty much everywhere. It comes at us at lightning speed

The news often takes us by surprise, with stories leaping out at us like a jungle puma whose nap has been interrupted. Throughout this book, youll find examples of when the news can come out of nowhere and give you a BONK on the head. Keep an eye out for Surprise Stories, in this book and in real life.

It comes at us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Even when were sleeping, the news machine is wheezing and grinding out top stories. Because something is always happening somewhere. There are always new events to tell the world about.

People who create the news reporters , presenters , editors , camerapeople , online writers , technical boffins etc. work incredibly hard to get information into our homes. They do this because they believe that, like oxygen and water, a constant stream of information to everyday people is extremely important . It means that ordinary folk know whats happening in the world around them: which politician has been misbehaving, which tennis player won Wimbledon and how charities are helping people who are less well off than most.