This paper reports on a classroom action research study on teaching news writing in English to two different classes of English Department students. Twelve students from the Diploma Programme and 12 others from the Undergraduate Programme enrolled in the course, English for Journalism, were purposively selected to participate in this research. Teaching of this kind requires a unique strategy because the students are faced with the problem of news content on the one hand and that of how to convey the content on the other. In addition to strengthening the news content through field observation and interviews of the source of information, students should create suitable kinds of genre at the discourse level and select appropriate types of lexicogrammar at the clause level. Basically, news falls into the recount genre, but there are usually some sub-genres embedded within this larger genre. How concepts of genre work and how lexicogrammar should be employed in teaching English news writing are the focus of discussion in this paper. The results of this research show that regardless of the different learning performance of the two groups of students, it is evident that in transferring field knowledge to a well-arranged news piece consisting of relevant sentences, students in the different classes need knowledge of both text organisation associated with genre and linguistic skills associated with lexicogrammar choices.