Researching your story (GFX)
GFX= Graphics
Basically, this means "words that will appear on the screen."
Basically, this means "words that will appear on the screen."
Where to find print sources
- Easiest method? Simple Google search. Click on an article. Find a part of the article you want to use. Capture a screen shot of the article by following this guide.
- Check out the sources pages- you'll find an abundance of useful links.
- Hint: blogs and opinion articles are more likely to offer perspective than a straight-forward news story. When searching in Google news, you can choose either "blogs" or "articles"- check the "blogs" first.
- Another hint: Headlines can tell you a lot about the tone of the story. Example? "Walmart moving streaming video service to its web site" versus "Netflix's next big competitor: Walmart?" The second source is a sure bet for some perspective.
Which part of the article to use
- Your print sources will often be snarkier and more opinionated than your video sources. In this story about how Octomom says she hates her kids, we used this line from an Inquistr blog:
Rather than this line from the same article:
"Suleman says she 'hates' the octuplets and that her older children are 'animals' ..."
The first option is commentary, a prediction, from the blogger. The second option was just simply a summary of what happened.
- Knowing which elements to use to build your story is something you'll get better at throughout the semester. Feel free to pull several parts of the article in question and talk to your editor about which one would work best with your story.
Guidelines for using GFX sources
- Each time you find a GFX you want to use, copy the link to the source and paste it underneath the GFX element in your script. Check out the sample scripts to see what this looks like.
- If there are quotations in the part of the article you want to use, you need to change them to single quotations in your script and then add double quotations around the entire section you are using.
- You can omit words from a GFX as long as you don't change the meaning by using ellipses (...). Like this: “Both Amazon and Google have seemingly irritated...the major music labels by launching their...cloud services without licensing agreements." You can even use one line from one paragraph and another from the next paragraph as long as you DO NOT CHANGE THE INTENDED MEANING.
- Do not try and mix the reporter's words with a source's words.
For example DO NOT use this "'It turns out, shoes really do protect your feet,' said shoe expert Carl Pipsquire. 'I can't believe it took so long to figure that out.' Pipsquire and other experts have been debating about shoes for decades."
It's confusing to use part of a quote plus part of a report. Instead, do something like this:
(AOC)
Shoe expert Carl Pipsquire says his colleagues have been debating about shoes for decades. Pipsquire tells CNN...
(GFX)
"'It turns out, shoes really do protect your feet...I can't believe it took so long to figure that out.'"