25 Rules of journalism

Great post on the Guardian blog of science writer Tim Radford on how to be a great Journalist.

http://ht.ly/3O4a6

Among my favourites are:

1. The reader is the most important person in your world. You are working for them
2. The next sentence you write is the most important in your life. You may feel obliged to write, but no reader is obliged to read
3. No one will ever complain that you have made something too easy to understand.
4. The classic error in journalism is to overestimate what the reader knows and underestimate the reader's intelligence.
5. Don't even start writing till you have decided what the one big thing is going to be, and then say it to yourself in just one sentence.
6.  Words like shallow, facile, glib and slick are not insults to a journalist. The whole point of paying for a newspaper is that you want information that slides down easily and quickly, without footnotes, obscure references and footnotes to footnotes.
7. Clichés are, in the newspaper classic instruction, to be avoided like the plague. Except when they are the right cliché. 
8. Remember that people will always respond to something close to them. Concerned citizens of south London should care more about economic reform in Surinam than about Millwall's fate on Saturday, but mostly they don't. Accept it.