Journalistic Writing vs. Academic Writing

One of the rules I have struggled with the most while learning to write journalistically is keeping it simple. My first major was professional writing, and even though I have since switched to Broadcast Journalism, I would still love to write a book when I am older. I would definitely say I have more of a “novelist” style of writing, so learning to write in a simpler form has been a challenge for me. In high school, it seems like our teachers encourage us to expand our vocabulary and express it in our writing for essays and research papers. Is this because it makes us sound more intelligent or do they just enjoy seeing the random words we pull out of a thesaurus that probably don’t make any sense whatsoever?

I feel like my journalistic writing is improving, but it is definitely not perfect. I had never really realized that journalists keep it as simple as possible, because I never paid much attention to the structure and word usage of newspaper articles when I skimmed through them, but now that I am experiencing journalistic writing, it definitely makes more sense to keep it simple rather than trip up our readers with complicated words and sentence structures.