Interfax-Azerbaijan news agency head gives master class to young journalists

Director-General of Interfax-Azerbaijan News Agency Anar Azizov was a guest of the Report Media School. At a workshop with students of the Media School, Anar Azizov spoke about standards of news writing.

"All in all, it takes a day for a news report to be remembered. For this reason, many media outlets that run after ratings try to attract readers with attractive headlines. Sometimes, a news report has nothing to do with a headline, and as a result, the logical sequence is broken. A journalist, who writes a news story, should think about readers, not himself. A ten-paragraph story will look very boring."

The director-general advised young journalists to stick to the "scissors principle" when writing a news report: "We have to stick to the rules applied to news writing. Even if we take scissors and cut a news report from the bottom up, the readers must understand its essence in one sentence.”

Anar Azizov has been working for Interfax-Azerbaijan since 2003. He was named the editor-in-chief in 2015 and director-general in 2018.