Damon Hickman

Writing 310
Professor De Piero
25 October 2015
Artifact Analysis
One potential field Im considering pursuing a career in is the media/news field.
So, I thought that a few scripts and articles would be great artifacts to analyze for this
project. I chose three broadcast news scripts, one teleprompter script for a news
anchor, and one newspaper (a campus newspaper from the school I transferred from)
where I plan to analyze a few articles within, as well as the newspaper as a whole.
First things first, all of these artifacts fall within the same [general] genre: news,
information, story-telling to some degree. Even though news can be told in print,
broadcast, and multimedia form, its usually very easy to distinguish something in the
news genre. News, in contrast with many other genres, usually doesnt care too much
about the authors personal opinion, instead using quotes and facts to tell the story.
Newspaper articles, television and radio scripts, as well as teleprompter scripts
all have the same purpose, regardless of whether the audience is reading, listening, or
watching. Though my artifacts all serve the same general purpose, there are a few
differences worth discussing for the sake of analyzing. The scripts are, generally, meant
to not only inform, but engage the viewer and get them interested in the topic enough to
wait for the actual segment to be aired. For example, one of my scripts is a news

anchors introduction: Tonight on the Channel 4 news.. This introduction serves as

the starter to the news segment, much like a newspapers front page. Their purpose is
to inform, engage the readers/listeners/viewers, and present them with facts, and not
opinion unless its an opinion piece of news or a talk show. In contrast with creative
writing or work of fiction where the purpose can be to inform but is usually more for
entertainment/leisure, news writings purpose is to inform and engage, as well as
forming a bond with the audience to ensure they are loyal.
Next, the audience within the artifacts can vary. In the case of my artifacts, the
television scripts are intended for the news crew who will translate the script for the
television audience, while the newspaper is intended for a different kind of audience.
Some people like to read their news, some people like to listen/watch their news. What
these audiences have in common is they are choosing to be informed by news, not a
short-story, or book of poetry; the audience wants information of some kind. Another key
aspect of the news rhetoric is the inevitable fact that most publications/news stations
rely heavily on viewers and readers to keep their organizations afloat, so its important
that viewers get what they expect: which, again, is information, even if its told in an
entertaining way.
My artifacts all definitely have conventions which follow the news writing genre.
Firstly, due to the nature of news, the ethos concept is extremely relevant to the entire
genre. To establish the ethos credibility, newspapers boldly display the name of the
publication on the front cover, and also provide bylines which tell the name of the author
and other relevant information, such as date and time of publication. In addition, my

script artifacts all do the same: the news anchor script immediately lets the viewers
know what news station they are watching, which establishes the ethos concept.
In addition to the convention of establishing credibility, the artifacts all adhere to a
more-formal style of writing. The conventions of news writing greatly differ from other
forms of writing based off of this alone; the omission of opinion in articles and segments,
replaced with quotes and factual figures, are a convention not many genres of writing
use, although definitely not exclusive to news writing. Also, the story-telling involved
with scripts and articles is conventional, as is the use of descriptive and vivid language.
Another convention of news-writing is the use of attribution. Because newswriting is the telling of facts to tell the story, its crucial to state where this information is
coming from, because it usually isnt coming directly from the writer/anchor.
The tone of my artifacts all have something in common: they may be playful and
engaging depending on the audience and type of news, but the tone screams purpose,
and formality. Like I stated earlier, news-writing typically takes on a more-formal tone,
and within my artifacts this is expressed by the diction and syntax. Most of the language
used in my artifacts is authoritative; its less colloquial and casual, but proper and
systematic. You instantly recognize youre reading something that somebody had to be
trained and conditioned on, as opposed to reading a blog post which is more relaxed
and casual. The syntax adheres to conventional news-writing styles, which is one
aspect of news-writing that makes it so recognizable. The scripts are laid out in
two/three column displays, indicating which words are meant to be spoken by the on-air
anchor, or meant to be performed by those behind the scenes (director, producer,
technical director, etc).