Arranging and developing your news story format is another key to good story-telling. Below are some time-tested formats for structuring a news story.
- You must use writing techniques that promise great things to come and then fulfill that promise
- Treat sources as characters, capture tension and tell the events in chronological order
Alternative story forms:
- Chronology
- News narrative
- Focus structure
- Service journalism formats
Chronology
- Use for those that have complications or tension and a resolution worth waiting for
- Look for a key moment
- Jot down a time lie
- Outline the story:
- The lead
- The nut: nut paragraph gives the theme of the story and summarizes the key facts
- To Be Sure paragraph gives opposing points of views
- Ending needs to be strong
News Narrative: news with narrative emphasis: when the news is less important than the story
- Open story with an interesting scene or twist that teases the story
- Follow with a traditional news lead
- Then brief paragraphs that add whatever is needed to understand the story summarized in traditional lead
- Then transition back to the beginning to tell the story in chronological order
- May use other tools like: scenes, dialogue, anecdotes and foreshadowing
- Use Focus Structure
- Tells the story of an individual to represent a bigger population
- “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”—Joseph Stalin
The Lead
You write articles about diseases; you write stories about people. Focus on the people, not the event. Once you finish the opening, you must finish the “setup” of the story.
Transition and Nut Paragraph
- Construct a transition that explicitly make the connection to the nut/theme paragraph
Foreshadowing
- Can be done in a single line, or over several paragraphs
- What can you promise the reader?
So what?
- Tells readers explicitly whey they should care
To be sure.
- Writers must acknowledge that there are two or more sides to a story
- Writing the Body
Think of readers as anxious to do something else
- Mix exposition (the facts) with narrations (the story line)
- Writing the Ending: Tie-back: a reference to something that appears at or near the beginning of the story
Service journalism
- “News you can use”
- “Refrigerator journalism”