News Reporting And Writing 13th Edition

How to Actually Use This Textbook Without Wasting Your Time

The 13th edition of News Reporting And Writing is the most widely assigned textbook in intro journalism courses in the United States. It covers AP Style, inverted pyramid structure, headline writing, beat reporting, and the nuts and bolts of news production. The authors — Brent Russell, Brian Wells, and Steve Riggs — are working journalists turned educators, which means the book has real-world grounding rather than pure academic theory. Here is how I use it with students. I do not make them read it cover to cover. That does not work. Instead, I assign specific chapters before we start the corresponding unit in class, and I have them complete the exercises at the end of each chapter as homework. The exercises are what matter. The reading gives context. The exercises build the skill. I encountered a specific problem last semester that I did not expect. The book's section on enterprise feature writing assumes students have access to a beats system — local government schedules, police blotters, press releases from nearby organizations. My students at a commuter campus mostly had no such access. They were writing feature stories from entirely secondhand sources because the book's examples and exercises assumed a campus newspaper environment that didn't exist for half my class. The workaround was simple: I replaced the enterprise feature assignments with local community story assignments using public records requests, meeting agendas posted online, and public library resources. The learning outcomes stayed the same. The students just had a more realistic path to get there.

News Reporting And Writing 13th Edition — What You Actually Need to Know

The book is organized into roughly four major sections. The first covers news values, ethics, and the legal framework — fair report, privilege, defamation basics. The second is the core: structure, leads, attribution, and the inverted pyramid. The third covers beats and specialized reporting — politics, courts, business, health. The fourth deals with features, columns, and editing fundamentals. Most students skip the ethics and law sections because they feel dry. That is a mistake. In my experience, students who ignore those chapters end up making avoidable mistakes in their reporting within the first month of working on a real assignment. The book covers actual cases, not just abstract principles. Read those chapters. They will save you from publishing something you have to later correct or retract. One counter-intuitive thing about this book that beginners consistently miss: the lead writing section is not actually about crafting clever openers. It is about discipline and economy. The book emphasizes that a good lead answers the who, what, when, and where before it does anything else. Students always want to be clever. The best leads in this book are the ones that get out of the way and let the news happen. I have students rewrite their leads three or four times until the first sentence does exactly one thing — it tells the reader the single most important fact in the story.

Another thing the book gets right but does not make obvious: attribution is not just about avoiding plagiarism. It is about transparency. Every claim in a news story needs to be attributed to a source or documented in some way. The book shows you how to vary attribution so it does not sound robotic, but the deeper lesson is that unattributed claims destroy credibility faster than anything else. A story with attribution issues can be fixed with a correction. A story without it cannot be salvaged once published. The AP Style section included in this edition is current through the 2025 yearbook updates. That matters because AP changes capitalization rules, punctuation guidance, and terminology roughly once a year. If you are using an older edition, the style entries for recent terms — cryptocurrency, AI-related terminology, pandemic-era vocabulary — may be wrong or missing. Always check the publication date before relying on the style guide portions.

Practical How-To: Using This Book in a Course or Self-Study

If you are taking a course that assigns this book, here is what I recommend based on actual classroom use: Read the chapter before the class session on that topic. Do not treat it as a reference. Treat it as preparation. Do every exercise at the end of each chapter. The exercises are not busy work. They simulate real newsroom tasks — rewriting leads, fixing attribution errors, constructing headlines, identifying news values in raw source material. The feedback loop is immediate. You write something, you check your work against the examples, you revise. That repetition builds the habit.

Use the AP Stylebook alongside this book. The textbook references AP Style but does not replace it. When the book says follow AP on a certain formatting issue, open the stylebook and verify it. This habit of cross-referencing is what separates students who learn the skill from students who just pass the class. Pay attention to the case studies and real news examples scattered throughout. The authors include actual published stories from outlets like The New York Times, The Associated Press, and regional newspapers. These are not illustrations — they are the standard you are being asked to meet. Study them the way a musician studies aEtude. The sections on fact-checking and verification are worth more time than most students give them. The book walks through how to confirm a name, a title, a statistic, a quote. In practice, this is the difference between a story that stands up to scrutiny and one that collapses under it. I have seen students lose internships over failures in this area. It is not dramatic. It is just a missing fact or an unverified claim that an editor catches.

What This Book Does Not Cover Well

No textbook covers everything. The 13th Edition has real gaps that you should be aware of: It does not cover digital-first reporting workflows — CMS management, SEO for news, social media distribution, audience analytics. If your program or your career path involves digital newsrooms, you will need to supplement this with other resources. The book treats online publishing as an extension of print rather than as its own discipline. The data journalism section is minimal. Beat reporting with numbers — budget analysis, crime statistics, election results — requires skills this book only briefly touches on. For that, you would want something like Don Gayton's Data-Driven Journalism or the NICAR training materials.

The multimedia and podcasting sections are thin. Modern newsrooms expect reporters to handle basic audio recording, editing, and publishing. This book acknowledges those skills but does not teach them in any depth. That is a deliberate editorial choice, not an oversight, but it is something to keep in mind. Finally, the book assumes access to sources and newsrooms that many students do not have. The enterprise reporting examples assume you can walk into a press conference, schedule an interview with a city council member, or get a document from a public records office. In reality, building those skills requires proactive effort that the textbook cannot teach on its own. Practice matters more than the reading.

Where to Find the Book

The 13th Edition is published by Cengage Learning. It is available through most university bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and directly from Cengage. The ISBN for the hardcover is 978-0-357-89252-4. There is also a Loose-Leaf version available. Some instructors prefer the loose-leaf format because it is lighter and fits more easily into a three-ring binder for note-taking. The content is identical. Cengage also offers a bundled digital option that includes the eText and access to additional online resources. Whether that is worth it depends on your program. The eText is searchable, which helps when you are looking for a specific concept across chapters. The built-in highlighting and note tools are functional if you prefer reading on screen. If cost is a concern, the previous edition (12th Edition) is significantly cheaper on the used market and covers the same foundational material. The main differences between editions are updated AP Style entries, revised case studies, and a few new chapters on digital ethics and social media verification. If you are not in a strictly current course, the 12th Edition will serve you nearly as well. The core reporting skills do not change between editions.

Final Notes

This book is a tool, not a solution. Reading it will not make you a good reporter. Completing the exercises, practicing the skills in the field, and getting feedback on your work will. The textbook gives you the framework. The work outside the classroom gives you the ability. The students who get the most out of this book are the ones who treat every chapter as a set of instructions for something they will actually do. They rewrite the leads. They fact-check the practice stories. They compare their headlines to published ones. They keep an AP Stylebook open next to them while they work. That is the pattern that works. Anything else is just reading.