News Item

Pernah baca Koran kan? Ga mungkin kalau ga ada yang ga pernah baca Koran. Yeah, that is my statements. How about you? Do you agree with me? Ternyata, Koran bukan hanya sekadar Koran. Koran juga memiliki generic structures seperti text lainnya. Do you know the generic sturcutres of news item?

News item is a text which informs readers about events of the day. The events are considered newsworthy or important.

The purpose of news item is to inform the readers, listeners, or viewers about events of the day which are considered newsworthy or important.

Generic structures of news item:
• Newsworthy events (gives events in a summary form)
• Background events (elaborates about what happened/what caused the events)
• Sources (comments given by participants involved in the events)

Language features of news item:
• Using action verbs
• Using saying verbs
• Using passive sentence

There are some rules that can help to make newspaper more comprehensible:
• The passive voice is used without the appropriate form be.
• It is unusual to find complex forms, generally the simple present form is used.
• The present progressive tense is used, usually to describe something that is changing or developing, but the auxiliary verb is usually left out. The fu
• To refer the future, headlines often use the infinitive.
• Headlines are not always complete sentences.



Example of news item

Indonesian Wins US Short Movie Maker

An Indonesian filmmaker has won the second “Democracy Video Challenge” competition held by the US State Department, and hopes is work can promote Indonesian democracy to the world.
“ I hope with this movie, the rest e world of the acknowledge Indonesian democracy. Democracy is not just a noun but a process, and there’s something amiss in Indonesian’s democratic processes,” Adhyatmika or Mika, told a press conference at the US Embassy in Jakarta on Friday.
Mika, a graduate from Puttnam School of Film, Lasalle College of the arts in Singapore, called his work as”a dark humor” movie.
“I decided to translate my understanding of Indonesian democracy through a “dark humor” movie because if I tell it in a serious way, people won’t see it,” he said.
US Assistant Cultural Attache Arend C. Zwartjes said the movie reflected the message of the competition.
“We didn’t want to tell the world about democracy according to our own concept, but we wanted the world share many concepts of democracy,” he explained.
Mika won a two-week trip to the US next October together with other winners from Iran, Spain, Colombia, Nepal, and Ethiopia. The group will have an interview at Today’s Show at NBC and are slated to meet the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“What drives me to take part in this competition was the chance for the winner to meet Hillary Clinton, and if I meet her, I’ll have an opportunity to tell her about Indonesian democracy,” Mika said as quoted by Antara news agency. He admitted in making his movie he was influenced by Wes Anderson, an American movie director who was nominated for a 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for “ The Royal Tenenbaums”.
Source: September 6,2010 http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/09/03/indonesian-wins-us-short-movie-contest.html

Did you know?
Newspaper language is not same as the ordinary English. They prefer words that are usually shorter and distinctive.