1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Writing 107
In addition to these guidelines, you should also be aware of some
of the elephant traps awaiting the inexperienced journalist. Here
are a few of the deepest.
The frequent use of adjectives or adverbs to ‘pump a story up’
often has the opposite effect. As Waterhouse puts it: ‘Smothering
an intro in a ketchup of adjectives does little to improve its flavour’.
Expressing the facts of the story clearly and vigourously should
provide all the necessary impact. If you have to prop up a story
with adjectives, question whether it’s worth writing in the first
place.
Avoid an excessive use of clichés. They can be trite and tired.
That isn’t to say clichés should be avoided like the plague. As
Sellers explains: ‘Cliché chopping ought not to get out of hand. In
many cases the cliché is the warm familiar phrase that the readers
recognise, that puts things in a nutshell.’
Avoid tautologies whenever possible. General consensus or
mutual agreement (how can you have any other?), strange
phenomena (presumably to distinguish it from the mundane
variety) and continue to remain (as opposed to stopping to
remain?) are just three examples of words that have been wedded
in unholy matrimony by constant, unthinking usage. You don’t
need to say something twice to get the message across.
You should filter out all jargon and ‘officialese’. This shouldn’t
be difficult for the journalist who has to discover what the jargon
means in simple terms anyway, to understand the story. Once he
or she has a ‘plain language’ explanation, it would seem obvious to
use it in their written account. Instead, too many journalists
inexplicably retreat back into the dark world of jargon when finally
writing their story. How do they expect their readers to
understand the same dead, grey language that confounded them,
the journalists, in the first place?
This mistake is usually made because the journalist is either
under pressure or lazy. It is easier for them to pass on the official
gobbledegook to readers than exert the necessary effort to
explain it in simple terms. Occasionally, and more worryingly, it
can also occur because the journalist doesn’t understand the
jargon and so can only repeat it rather than interpret it. That is a
cardinal sin.