Rewriting a News Content

What is rewriting

Rewriting of News is used in order to avoid accusations of copyright infringement by changing the source text to the level of the original text. Put simply; it’s rewriting an existing news item in a different way.

Because every important news is presented by many news papers, its the same piece of information that is reported in different ways.

In fact, today's journalists do not run around to get the news - news items actually come to reporters. So, modern journalism has been reduced to selection of ‘good’ news item, and then rewriting it.

There are two main rewriting methods:

1) Simple rewriting: In this case, words in the original text are replaced with synonyms. In order to create such materials, one can even install a synonymizing software, which accelerates rewriting. Search engines perceive such texts as unique, but the original text could be still recognized;

2) Complex rewriting: Such rewriting is carried out for more demanding news agencies and publications, it is close to copywriting. However, the principle remains the same – the rewriter fully preserves the content of the text without inserting his/her opinion.

So the task of a rewriter is to transform the source, by rewriting it in one's own words, while keeping its content intact.

For the purpose of UMMnews, rewriting is a mixture of Simple and Complex methods, and can be achieved by involving one or more of the following;

using synonymous words;
rearrangement of words, sentences and paragraphs;
text simplification by deleting the words and phrases;
transformation of direct speech into indirect;
mentioning the name of the news source within your content, especially when the material is exclusive, controversial or sensitive;
useing simple words and small sentences (it does not need to sound like professional journalistic language. Keep in mind that UMMnews has a global readership, and a good proportion comes from a non-English speaking background).

Redesigned text should have the same or a smaller amount of information as compared to the original source. Generally speaking; you rewritten news content should be 3 to 6 paragraphs (about 100 to 200 words).

Unless the source is credible and well established, you must cross-check the content from other sources.

Steps

Determine the geographic area, or the topic you are interested to report.
Find suitable online sources. For example, if you are interested in reporting political news from India, find some of the reliable news sources. In this example, your news sources could be The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Wire, etc.
Save their web address as favourites for easy access.
Select an interesting news content.
Copy the content from the portal to MS Word (or similar) document.
Go through the content, and highlight the parts you want to capture in red.
Copy-paste the red part into a new MS Word document. You may re-arrange/restructure the paragraphs of your content while copying.
Apply synonyms words and reformat your paragraphs. MS Word can show you synonyms words that you can choose from.
Type a heading for the content. It should be different to the original heading, but should reflect same meaning. Try to keep it limited to eight words.
Read the rewritten content (at least twice) and correct any spelling or grammatical mistakes.
Insert the date between the title and content.
Reformat the content to ensure that the texts and spaces are looking good.
Save the content in a folder in your local drive. Keep the name of the file same as the title. This may be required for future reference.
Log in to UMMnews and submit the content you just rewrote by simply copying and pasting the Title and the Content.
You can attach an Image to the content, as long as there is no copyright issue, and it has been adjusted to UMMnews’ standard image size. See UMMnews Tutorial 2A for more information on image; (https://vimeo.com/316340204)
Select or fill other information in the Submission form and Save.

Note that the content does not get published as soon as you save it. An UMMnews editor will review your content, and may contact you if any changes are required.