Computer-assisted Reporting is revolutionsing Australian journalism. Unfortunately, few working journalists are equipped to use these new techniques. However, some tertiary journalism students are already using CAR to enhance traditional reporting methods. Students get information from online databases, create their own databases to spot trends, and use spreadsheets to crunch numbers. They get story ideas and become instant experts by lurking on some of the thousands of usergroups, newsgroups, bulletin bulletin board and listservs. They use email to “interview†experts worldwide. In short, teenage students can produce investigative feature stories far beyond the capabilities of senior journalists. This revised edition of Newspaper Feature Writing by Len Granato is at the cutting edge of the revolution. It has three main aims: to maintain and enhance the systematic approach to feature writing pioneered in the earlier editions; to help lecturers integrate CAR into their courses; and to give working journalisms some instruction in CAR.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Len Granato
Len Granato was the Journalism Coordinator and Associate Professor of Journalism at the Queensland University of Technology until his early retirement at the end of 1996. He worked as a journalist for four newspapers in the United States before joining United Press International. In eight years with UPI he held senior editorial positions, including several in the New York world headquarters. Granato earned a PhD at Southern Illinois University and lectured at four US Universities, including the University of Arkansas at little Rock, where he served five years as Head of the Department of journalism, before coming to the then-QIT in1979. In 1986 he took a Professional Development Leave from QIT and worked for six months as a senior journalist at the Queensland Times in Ipswich to gain experience in Australian journalism, to become acquainted with modern practices and to freshen his writing and reporting skills. After being out of daily journalism for 17 years, Granato won a highly commended citation in the Walkley Awards for an eight-part feature series on Steet Kids in the Queensland Times. Upon his return to QIT, he wrote the first edition of Newspaper Feature writing drawing on his own feature writing experience in the US and Australia, theories he had developed as a professional feature writer and as an academic, and his critiques of his student's feature-writing efforts, which were pointers to common problems encountered by beginning feature writers.
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