Writing Basics

An effective lead-building approach that incorporates the 5W’s and 1H

How best to write a lead has always been a matter of preference, so long as the key aspects of what matters most get into the first sentence of the news story. When it comes to boiling the lead down to the basics, we tend to lean on our favorite six items: The 5W’s and the 1H. For beginning writers, these elements provide a good set of guidelines for determining what matters most and how to put it into the lead.

The difficult part comes in two specific parts:

  1. Identifying the key aspects of what matters most in the lead
  2. Determining the proper order for them.

In most cases, students tend to like to write from front to back, giving themselves a little runway before getting into what matters and why. This is a symptom of years of writing to fill space (“You need to write a 5-page paper that describes…”) instead of learning to write from the core of what matters most.

Here’s a good way of helping students figure out how to build from the core out, by identifying the key elements of a story that can serve as the main part of the lead.

Begin with the idea that the 5W’s and 1H give you some sense of what needs to be in a decent, standard, beginner’s news lead:

  • Who
  • What
  • When
  • Where
  • Why
  • How

Then realize that if you write in the active voice in a direct fashion, you pretty much have the main part covered in noun-verb-object elements:

The key then is to figure out what best to put into those three spots (and, yes I know that that spot is normally for a direct object, not necessarily other objects like the object of a preposition. Sr. Mary Kenneth is long dead but her foreboding figure still haunts me…)

  • Packers beat Buccaneers
  • Guardians win division
  • Mayor vetoes bill

Once you nail that down, you’ve got the remaining 3W’s and 1H to play with and how include them or where you put them is dependent upon what you think matters most to your readers. Think about adding another “layer” to the core, with the more valuable element at the top of the layer and the lesser element at the bottom of the layer:

In this case, I went with “immediacy” leading me to including a “when” sooner rather than later, and I went with “how” because in the cases I selected, it seemed to matter to me as a reader more than the other elements.

See what you think when we add the pieces like this:

  • Tom Brady failed to complete a last-minute, two-point conversion, as the Green Bay Packers beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 14-12, Sunday.
  • With a Chicago White Sox loss, the Cleveland Guardians clinched the AL Central division Sunday.
  • Relying on a little-used law from 1824, Mayor Sam Smith vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given city residents property-tax relief.

In all three cases, there was a pretty intriguing “how” element that added something that readers might want to know, so I put the “How” up front as a clause and kept the core where it was. It’s always possible to layer those “How” and “When” elements elsewhere,  but in these cases, it seemed like I could make a case involving value and clarity.

After that, you can layer on the remaining elements as you see fit:

In this case, the “Why” could be a “Why do I care?” for filling in the oddity factor, or a “Why” as in a “Why did this happen?” answering the question like we normally would expect in a lead:

  • Tom Brady failed to complete a last-minute, two-point conversion, as the Green Bay Packers beat the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, 14-12, Sunday at Raymond James Stadium…
    • WHY 1: giving Aaron Rodgers his second career win against a Brady-led team
    • WHY 2: keeping the Packers tied for first in the NFC Central
    • WHY 3: dealing the Buccaneers their first loss of the season
  • With a Chicago White Sox loss, the Cleveland Guardians clinched the AL Central division Sunday.
    • WHY 1: Securing a playoff spot for the youngest team in baseball this year.
    • WHY 2: for the 11th time since 1995
  • Relying on a little-used law from 1824, Mayor Sam Smith vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given city residents property-tax relief.
    • WHY 1: arguing that the city can’t afford the loss in revenue.
    • WHY 2: to demonstrate the need to clean up arcane laws on the city’s books.

As noted in the books, not every W and H will make the cut for a lead, nor should they. (You don’t want to ask Terry Francona, “Hey, why did you clinch the division like that?”) That said, this might be a neat way of helping students prioritize their ordering of elements and building leads from a solid foundation that focuses on what matters most.

Media Writing 101: Accuracy and clarity are not the same thing

Don Drysdale

Don Drysdale had a “2-for-1” system when it came to pitching. If your team hit one of his batters, he would hit two of yours. Nice guy.

One of my favorite stories that distinguished accuracy and clarity involved legendary pitcher Don Drysdale, a mean and nasty SOB, who had no compunction about hitting batters as part of his game plan.

In the middle of a game, manager Walter Alston came out to the mound and told him, “I want you to put this guy on,” meaning Alston didn’t want Drysdale to pitch to the batter, but instead walk him and pitch to the next hitter.

Drysdale nodded and then subsequently drilled the batter in the side with the first pitch.

Alston ran back out to the mound and said, “What the hell are you doing? I told you to walk the guy!”

“No,” Drysdale replied. “You told me to put him on. He’s on first base. Get your ass back into the dugout.”

Media writing requires us to be accurate above all else, but being right doesn’t always mean we’ve clearly communicated with the readers. Something can be right while simultaneously being as clear as mud.

Let’s look at this short crime story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that ran over the weekend. Starting with the lead, we’ve got some issues:

Two men were shot and killed, and an innocent bystander was injured, about 10:25 a.m. Saturday outside one of the El Rey Hispanic grocery stores in Milwaukee, police said.

Solid information about key things (two dead, shooting occurred). It includes a time element and an attribution. However, what’s not there is probably more important than what is:

  • “One of the El Rey Hispanic grocery stores” implies that there are multiple stores with this name, which is true. However, as a reader, I’d like to know WHICH ONE of the three stores experienced this shooting. I don’t get that until the fourth paragraph of the story.
  • The passive voice in the lead (“were shot and killed”) leaves me hanging a bit, as I don’t know who did the shooting, how many people were shooting or if the person/people doing the shooting are still running around out there. That could be frightening if I knew where this thing actually happened, which I still don’t…
  • The term “innocent bystander” has a lot of trouble here. First, as opposed to what? A guilty bystander? Someone who probably deserved a little lead justice? Second, this implies that the people who were shot probably had it coming, as they are not designated in this way. Third, it’s an opinion, so get rid of it.

The second paragraph gets us some additional info that would have been helpful up top, but still has some clarity issues:

Following a disturbance in the store, two security guards and a man went into the parking lot, where the man and guards exchanged gunfire. The man, who has not been identified, and one of the guards — a 59-year-old man — were struck and died at the scene, according to Milwaukee Police District Two Sgt. John Ivy. Police did not specify which man fired first or how many shots were fired.

One of the hardest things to deal with in a story like this is trying to balance lack of information against potential libel. If we had names for these people, it would be easier to explain what happened. (“Smith entered the store and argued with Jones and Jackson before the three men left the store. Smith then shot and killed Jones before Jackson shot and killed Smith.”) It’s not poetry, but it prevents confusion.

Here we have “man” as the only real descriptor that we can use because we can’t call someone a shooter (there were at least two, probably three from this reading), an assailant (libel issues) or other similar terms. That said, we have to do something to make this clearer for the readers, and that probably starts with the lead. Try this:

A 59-year-old security guard at an El Rey Hispanic grocery store died Saturday after he exchanged gunfire with a patron who was also killed, police said.

This does a couple things:

  • It closes the loop on the shooting so we know who was involved and that there’s not an active shooter in the area.
  • It gets a better set of descriptors up top for the guard so we can call him “guard” as opposed to “man” later in the story. It also pulls the bystander out, who was injured but not killed, and focuses on the bigger issues.

I hate the term “exchanged gunfire” as it sounds like a rebate program or something, but since the cops can’t say who shot at whom first, it’s the best we’re gonna do here. I’m also not thrilled with “patron” as I suppose we could argue if the guy is a patron because he might or might not have bought something. Other news coverage of the event seems to say this was a robbery of some kind (not sure if it was shoplifting or whatever), so maybe that would help shape how we define this guy if we could independently prove it ourselves.

(Remember, never take stuff from other media outlets, as you have no idea if they’re right. In this case, we also appear to have a discrepancy over the exact time, so make sure you get it on your own.)

Now in that second paragraph we can do some good work to improve clarity:

The shooting took place around 10:25 a.m. outside the store at 916 S. Cesar E Chavez Drive following a disturbance inside. Police did not say if the man or one of the two security guards who confronted him in the parking lot fired first, but added that a 41-year-old woman suffered minor injuries from a stray bullet.

This cleans up the “where” issue a bit better, moves the minor injuries down a bit and helps avoid the overuse of “man” in the second paragraph.

The rest of the story covers most of the rest of what little we know about the situation in functional fashion, so it’s not worth parsing. The thing to remember is that most people aren’t going to read deeply into a story to find all the details, so you need to give them the most-important information up top and as clearly as you can.

MISSING: Verbs and articles. If found, please return to area journalists…

At just the right time in the semester, a classic plea for improved writing showed up in one of my feeds. Journalism and educational expert Deborah Potter does a great job of explaining what is happening to broadcast copy and why we desperately need verbs in it.

Anyone watching television news these days could be forgiven for thinking they’ve accidentally tuned into a strange new game show called “Hide the Verb.” No matter how hard you try, it seems, you just can’t find one.

Remember verbs? They’re the action words that come between subjects and objects, telling what happened and when. Try locating one in this NBC Nightly News script: “Less resilient, local business. Dwight’s concession stand, in the family three generations. Sales this summer off 75 percent.” Not a verb in sight.

What is going on in TV newsrooms? It seems unlikely we’re victims of some vast anti-verb conspiracy that has recruited news writers from coast to coast. Instead, this new news-speak could actually be the result of a misguided attempt to improve broadcast writing by making it more active and immediate. The goal is laudable. The results are laughable.

It’s a great read that points to a real problem we’re seeing in writing. I’ve noticed a similar problem with my text-based students and their aversion to including articles in their sentences. To wit:

“Sturgeon man was injured during a fire at his home Friday.”

“Mayor says the bill will not be approved, despite city council’s efforts.”

I tended to blame a lot of this on texting, given that as more and more of my students spent more and more of their lives typing with their thumbs, I saw this sudden drop off of “A” and “The” and “An” in the sentences they wrote. However, in reading through Potter’s piece, it might just be more “headline-ese” creeping into common writing in an attempt to make things feel snappier.

In any case, I reached out to the educational hivemind I trust for a reality check on this to see if I was the only person noticing this. Clearly, I was not:

You are not alone. The dropping of articles is one of the banes of my existence. I consistently have to get after students in all of my classes, including the copy editing classes, where they ought to know better. I would add the 280-character limit of tweets as a culprit as well as texting.

Yes!! I am seeing it and correct it daily.
yup, I call it “Tweet Speak.”
Omg, I thought it was only me. I’ve come to the conclusion it is because they only read headlines, not leads. When did they stop teaching articles (a/an/the) are necessary to make a complete sentence?
Same here! I had a student tell me recently that proper grammar was a thing of the past, that the younger generation just doesn’t care about rules of writing.

Back when Twitter moved from 140 characters to 280, I argued against it, using my “Fat Pants Theory” of writing. After that ran, I heard back from folks who said, “Look, this will improve writing because we won’t have to shorten sentences or write in headline-speak to get the point across. Well, clearly that’s not the case here, as we find that no matter how much space Twitter gives some folks, they’re going to cut the corners on things that make content readable.

So here are a few hints and tips for ways to reach your students (and I mean the kind of reach that doesn’t involve an Oscar slap) as you explain why complete sentences matter:

AUDIENCE-CENTRICITY IS YOUR GOAL: That last comment in that hivemind list made my brain twitch for a couple reasons, not the least of which is this: You’re not writing for yourself.  You’re writing for your audience, many of whom might not be old enough to remember writing in cursive on coal slates, but are at least old enough to still operate in complete sentences. Those people will be expecting you to write in a functional fashion so that you can communicate to them effectively.

Also, grammar is not a fad. You can’t BS your way out of bad writing with comments like, “Ugh… Commas are so 1993….” When you make the decision that you’re going to change the rules of language because you don’t think they matter, what you’re saying is that you know better than everyone else out there and they should come around to your way of thinking. Not exactly audience-centric.

LET’S SAY IT ALOUD: One of the tricks I’ve used to get students to break the “verb-noun” habit they developed at some point in attribution writing is to have them say verb-noun sentences aloud. So, I’ll ask them, “What did you do today?” They answer with basic statements about eating breakfast, going for a run, coming to class and so forth. Then I say those things out loud to them in verb-noun format and have them repeat them:

  • Ate I my breakfast.
  • Six miles ran I.
  • Came to class I did.

Then we do the, “Does that sound like anything you would say? If not, stop doing ‘said Smith.’ If it is, you now must dress like Yoda for class, as you pretty much sound just like him…”

Have the students read these sentences aloud without the articles or verbs in them and see how they sound. When they start sound like “caveman speak,” to quote one of the other hivemind folks, they’ll start to realize how dumb this sounds. Like most things having to do with grammar, I could spend six hours explaining it in some long, complex way and they won’t get it. If I just have the students read something aloud, when their tongue feels like its falling down a flight of stairs, they realize there’s a problem.

KNOW THE RULES BEFORE YOU BREAK THEM: Some of the best writers I have ever read break a ton of grammar and style rules. The reason that they are great is that they know EXACTLY when to break EXACTLY which rule for EXACTLY what purpose. They know the rules like the back of their hand and thus can adhere to them effortlessly, until there’s a reason to zig when the rules zag.

Ignorance of a rule is not an excuse to break it, or at least that’s what the cop that pulled my wife over told us… In any case, knowing the rules is all about understanding why we do what we do and what it does for us as writers. You earn that right, as we’ve explained here before, by being awesome at the basics to the point where you know how and when to excuse yourself from their confines.

I have told my students not only what rules I expect them to follow rigorously, but also WHY those rules matter. I also explain that once they are no longer on “Filak Island,” they can do whatever the hell they want. Until then, the rules apply. In short, show me you know how to amaze me with the rules and then we’ll talk. Otherwise, knock it off.

DEMONSTRATE DISTINCTIONS: As noted earlier, the “WHY” aspect of teaching is usually the one that sticks the best. Telling students, “It’s a rule, so follow it,” has the same feel as when their parents answer a question with, “Because I’m your mother, that’s why!”

So, look at a couple examples where distinctions matter like this:

Sheriff’s deputy resigned amid allegations of extortion.

So we’re missing the article on this one. Why does it matter? Well if it’s “A” sheriff’s deputy, this might be a bad situation, but it wouldn’t necessarily undermine the department’s ability to function. If it’s “THE” sheriff’s deputy, you have cut the county’s law enforcement in half. Also, if you had half of the department extorting people, this could be terrifying for everyone in the county, as they had almost nowhere to turn for help.

For a verb example, let’s borrow a fragment from Potter’s piece:

Sales this summer off 75 percent.

Think about how a verb can change the context of this:

Sales this summer “ARE” off 75 percent or Sales this summer “WERE” off 75 percent. In the first version, there’s hope that sales could rebound, while the second example says we’re done and we have no hope.

  • “Sales this summer REMAIN off 75 percent.” (Things were bad and continue to be so.)
  • “Sales this summer FELL off by 75 percent.” (Things suddenly took a turn for the worse.)
  • “Sales this summer EXPECTED TO FALL off by 75 percent. (Prediction for bad stuff.)

And on and on we can go. The point is, our job is to inform people to the best of our ability. Skipping words to sound cooler (or younger, apparently) might seem like a good idea, but if it costs us the ability to connect with the readers, we’ve failed.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Lead writing: Finding the sweet spot between too much and not enough.

The look we did at leads earlier in the week seemed to hit a nerve for folks, so I dug into the archives for another lead-writing post, complete with an exercise at the end.

 

Enjoy!

—-

Lead writing: Finding the sweet spot between too much and not enough.

Some stories contain a lot of twists and turns, thus making a lead extremely difficult to write. An assignment I give to my introductory media writing class is to rewrite a lead on a story that has all sorts of problems. Here it is:

An Oshkosh man ac­cused of stealing women’s undergarments and sending them threatening letters told police he considered himself a sexual predator and ad­mitted he was close to committing more serious crimes — including rape and murder — but that his religious beliefs pre­vented him from following through.

The problems include:

  • The lead is 47 words long.
  • It includes a misplaced modifier that makes it sound like he’s threatening underpants.
  • We have no idea why we’re reading about this now (turns out, he was in court that day, which we don’t find out about until the second-to-last paragraph).
  • The thoughts he had or his self-confidence in his predatory-like nature isn’t as weird as what he actually did (which we find out more about later).
  • No real impact noted here, but if he was convicted, he would face more than 60 years in prison on five charges.

A more recent case of all sorts of potential elements clamoring for a spot in the lead occurred late last week when  Alec Cook, a former UW-Madison student, pleaded guilty to several charges related to sexual misconduct. Cook’s case was an odd and sprawling one, involving multiple victims and varying degrees of criminal activity.

According to one complaint, he choked and raped a woman after dinner and studying with her. Another complainant said he had drugged her before having non-consensual sex with her. Other complaints include allegations of stalking, inappropriate touching during class and strangulation attempts. In all, 11 women came forward and 23 charges were filed against Cook.

Trying to explain the magnitude of this while still avoiding the pitfalls of doing too much with the lead can be difficult. Below are the leads from several publications, with links to the stories.

Here is the lead from the Wisconsin State Journal, the daily newspaper located in Madison:

Former UW-Madison student Alec Cook pleaded guilty Wednesday to five felonies, including three counts of third-degree sexual assault, nearly bringing to a close a sprawling case that had been set for seven trials involving 11 alleged victims that were to have happened over the next several months.

 

Here is how The Capital Times, another daily news source located in Madison, wrote its opening:

Expelled student Alec Cook, who was scheduled to go on trial on Feb. 26 in the first of seven trials on 23 charges involving 11 female UW-Madison students, pled guilty Wednesday to five felony charges involving five accusers.

 

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the state’s largest newspaper, wrote this version:

An expelled University of Wisconsin-Madison business student accused of sexually preying on 11 women pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges involving five of them, closing the book on a high-profile case that shook the state’s flagship campus and drew national attention in fall 2016.

 

Here is the Associated Press lead, as published on the Chicago Tribune’s website:

A former student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has pleaded guilty to five felonies stemming from a string of alleged assaults around campus.

(UW-Madison also has two independent student newspapers, The Daily Cardinal and The Badger Herald. Both the Cardinal and the Herald covered the event and you can find their leads here. As I’ve said before, I don’t pick on student work in public whenever possible because a) students are learning and b) I don’t want to chill anyone’s desire to go to a student media organization to learn for fear of knocked around by an uppity Doctor of Paper. You can apply whatever lessons you learned here to them.)

You can see how various publications tried to encapsulate this case and the pros and cons of each. The State Journal and Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel both went big, which led to leads of 47 and 43 words, respectively. They significantly exceed what you normally shoot for with a standard news lead (25-35 words), but they do focus strongly on the “Oddity” interest element.

The Capital Times and the AP both go shorter, although the Cap Times still goes beyond the 35-word limit (38). However, they both skip out on the thing things that make this case well known and also extremely disturbing. The AP lead almost makes it sound like a) the assaults didn’t actually occur (“alleged” gives me hives) and b) this could have been a guy punching out bouncers or something instead of raping women.

You will also notice that the two Madison papers used a “name-recognition lead” (Alec Cook) while the other publications used an “interesting-action lead,” which focuses on the What more than the specific Who. The name, in this case, gets delayed to the second paragraph.

There is no such thing as a perfect lead, so you have to figure out what’s worth keeping and what’s worth cutting. This is why you have to think critically while writing your lead. Each lead has key benefits and drawbacks, based on the approach the writer saw fit to use and the audience each writer was attempting to reach.

EXERCISE SUGGESTION: Look through the four publications cited here and build a lead that fits the parameters outlined in both books for lead writing: 25-35 words, applies FOCII elements, contains key 5Ws/1H elements and will draw in your readers while remaining factually accurate and non-opinionated.

Lead Writing 101: You’re a journalist, not William Faulkner

Given that we just spent a great deal talking about the limits on the human attention span, I figured it might be a good time to take another look at leads. If we’re seeing people with less and less cognitive focus, the last thing we want to do is write a sentence like this famous one by William Faulkner, which once held a world record for length.

In the simplest terms, a lead should do two things:

  1. Tell the reader what happened in a simple, direct and engaging way.
  2. Tell the reader why this matters to them as a reader.

This is why starting with a noun-verb-object core works really well:

  • Packers beat 49ers
  • Bucks draft guard
  • Mayor rips media
  • Company wins contract

Then, we build around that core with more of the 5W’s and 1H. That usually keeps the focus on the important stuff and keeps the audience in our crosshairs when we’re writing the lead.

As numerous people have explained to me, not every lead needs to be that strict or bare bones. I agree, as I often tell students to try something different if they think they have an angle that might better engage the readers. However, I also point out that if the “new way of doing things” isn’t working out, it’s better to back away than to press on and make things worse.

Consider the following leads that needed a significant edit, a better sense of what matters or generally just a hug:

Georgia 33, Alabama 18, Lead Writer 66:
Take a look at what is essentially the lead on this story about the national championship. I say “essentially” as the first sentence of the story was basically a throw-away sentence that just got me to this monstrosity:

With 54 seconds left in Monday night’s College Football Playoff National Championship presented by AT&T, Georgia cornerback Kelee Ringo intercepted Alabama quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young and returned it 79 yards for a touchdown — the longest pick-six in championship game history — cementing the No. 3 Bulldogs’ 33-18 win over the No. 1 Crimson Tide and the program’s first national championship since 1980.

I don’t know if the writer was trying to celebrate the longest pick-six with the world’s longest sentence about one, but there has to be something we can do to chop back this 66-word monstrosity.

With 54 seconds left in Monday night’s championship game, Georgia cornerback Kelee Ringo intercepted Alabama’s Bryce Young and returned it 79 yards for a touchdown to cement the Bulldogs’ first national title since 1980.

Got it down to 34 words, or almost half of what that was without losing a whole lot in there. The only keeper I wish I could have kept would have been the score. We could fix that if we felt like it:

With 54 seconds left in Monday night’s championship game, Georgia cornerback Kelee Ringo’s 79-yard pick-six off Alabama’s Bryce Young cemented the 33-18 win and the Bulldogs’ first national title since 1980.

There. We’re at 31 words and we still didn’t lose anything, really.

The problem with this lead initially was the author was trying to turn a simple thing into a NASCAR vehicle: Just keep slapping little stickers on it until you eventually run out of them. The goal of any good writing is to present content to the audience members in the way that THEY would want it. So, let’s consider things that we definitely don’t need in the lead:

  • College Football Playoff National Championship presented by AT&T: The formal title is eight words of jargon and marketing. You’re not beholden to the money gods here, so feel free to simplify it.
  • quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner: First, you tell me he was intercepted. I don’t have an exact figure, but most interceptions are thrown by quarterbacks, so we can probably trim that. Second, it’s great he won the Heisman, but it’s not necessary in a sentence that’s already oversized. If you want to argue, “Hey, it shows how great of a QB he is,” OK, fine, but it’s the national championship game. I think we can assume he’s at least functional for a paragraph or two.
  • The rankings: No. 3 and No. 1. You told me it was a national championship game already, so, again, I don’t need the specifics in this sentence. If it weren’t teams in the top five playing for this, I’d be worried.

Stuff we could keep or pitch:

  • The longest pick-six in championship game history: It’s a nice tidbit, but it’s a long way of saying something we already said (defensive touchdown). If it were the longest pick-six to end the longest championship drought, maybe that’s a deal maker. Or, if the D had sucked all year and finally made a play, maybe. Still, it’s a mouthful for very little value.
  • With 54 seconds left in Monday night’s (game): A couple things to ponder: First, it’s at the front of the sentence. If the most important thing you want to tell me in the most important sentence is the “when,” it might not be a great sentence. Second, it’s really specific, which I could take or leave (with less than a minute left or something would be fine). Third, if you keep it, you now have a lead sentence that’s got seven numbers in it: 54, 79, 1, 3, 33, 18, 1980. It looks like something my mom would have played in a game of Keno.

The point of lead writing is to pick the things you MOST want to tell people and then trim away the stuff that doesn’t make the cut. It’s not supposed to be an attempt to cram 13 facts into a single sentence for the heck of it.

Question: How do you screw up an obituary for a rabbit?
Answer: Try to say 382 things in a lead:

Marlon Bundo, former vice president Mike Pence’s family pet who was the main character in a series of children’s books by the second family and a parody book that posited the rabbit as gay in a jab at the couple’s stance against LGBTQ rights, has died.

If you missed how a random rabbit became a best-selling author and flashpoint for LGBTQ issues, here’s the John Oliver segment on Mike Pence, cued up to the bunny bit:

I would normally spend a great deal of time picking this thing to pieces, but let’s just say I have some empathy for the reporter who had to work on this thing, given the number of random weird-ass assignments I got in my career. (There is still probably a locked file at the State Journal city desk in which three poli sci profs discuss the imminent death of Boris Yeltsin and its likely impact on Clinton presidency. Spoiler alert: He lived until 2007.)

That said, here’s a good rule of thumb: If your non-essential clause is 10 times larger than your essential clause, you probably need to rethink everything about that sentence.

Full House, meet Overly Full Lead:
Here’s the big dog, quite literally. It’s a lead sentence on a tribute to comedian Bob Saget, who died Jan. 9 at the age of 65.

No gaudy feat of method acting, no gnarly Christian Bale–as–Dick-Cheney physical transformation, no brazen bit of stunt casting in any of our lifetimes can compare to the magic trick Bob Saget pulled in 2005, when the gentle doofus who’d spent eight years as America’s Sweetest and Corniest Dad—via his starring role as Danny Tanner in the benign blockbuster ABC sitcom Full House, which ran from 1987 to 1995 and made the Brady Bunch look like the Hells Angels—popped up in a modest little film called The Aristocrats and told what can credibly be described by somebody on YouTube as the “Dirtiest Joke in the World.”

Not every lead needs to be 25-35 words or a pure inverted pyramid quote, but there are limits even in the world of “narrative” or “long form” journalism.  Or as a good friend and talented journalist noted: “Someone needs to tell this weenus that ‘long form’ doesn’t mean ‘no punctuation.'”

Again, it comes down to choices. Is it crucial to tell the readers EXACTLY how long Full House ran? Or that it was a blockbuster? Or that he did BOTH of those saccharine shows? Or describe everything with two sets of adjectives (sweetest and corniest; modest and little)? Or go through the verbal calisthenics to describe the world’s dirtiest joke?

Maybe all of those have value, but maybe not all at once in a single sentence that drones on for 109 words.

Stolen Focus: Understanding how the fractured mind works and how it impacts your work as a media writer

“The average human attention span is approximately 8 seconds, or one second shorter than that of a goldfish.”

I’ve seen this statistic for years, and even cited it in my own writing, often without thinking much about it. Critics of this statistic call its origin story and oversimplifying of cognitive effort into question, both of which are legitimate concerns. What they don’t debate, however, is how people are having a harder and harder time staying focused on any one thing.

Attention spans are changing, but this isn’t because we’re getting worse at focusing. Instead, our digital environment is making it harder for us to apply the most effective kinds of attention.

A study conducted by the Technical University of Denmark found that our collective attention spans are decreasing due to the huge amount of information presented to us at all times. Social media, 24/7 news updates, and ads are constantly competing for our attention. This means that it’s becoming harder and harder to give content our sustained or selective attention. Instead, we’re often relying on our divided attention, trying to focus on several things at once, and often failing to do so.

In looking through research on focus, one thing that people often fail to understand is that it’s not just about the thing we’re concentrating on and the thing that is pulling our attention away. It’s about the cognitive efforts and additional focus shifts that take place when we move from Action 1 to Action 2 and how that further fragments our mental capacity.

For example, let’s say you’re reading this blog post on your computer when a friend texts you about an upcoming plan. Even if you don’t answer your friend, you probably think you have a single split in your attention:

  • Blog post = 50%
  • Glance at text = 50%

That doesn’t seem so bad until you realize that your mind is being forced to engage in shifting behavior that you also have to account for. It actually works like this:

Blog post — Focus shift — Text message — Focus shift — Blog post again

In other words, it’s more like 20% of your focus is on each element in that amount of time, as you move from processing one thing to another.

Now realize that in most cases, we’re not just shifting between one thing and one other thing. We’re all over the place. Also, we’re constantly finding new things that attempt to grab our attention, further fracturing our focus.

In the book “Stolen Focus,” Johann Hari digs more deeply into each aspect of this issue, relying on both scholarly research and personal examples to outline how our ability to concentrate has been blown to bits. Here’s part of the book, as republished in The Guardian, which is kind of a bleak look at who we are now:

Prof Barbara Demeneix, a leading French scientist who has studied some key factors that can disrupt attention, told me bluntly: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” We can see the effects all around us. A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds. A different study of office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes. This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

So, if you’ve read this far, congratulations. You’ve hung in there for more than 65 seconds. With that in mind, let’s look at what this all means to journalists:

Write short, write clear, get it over with: When it comes to basic things, don’t be afraid to be basic. The whole goal of the 25-35 word lead and the short-paragraph inverted pyramid structure is to give people what they need to know and let them move on with life.

When we talk about this kind of writing, we often note that if a person stops reading at any point in the piece, they aren’t missing crucial information. What the authors above (and other researchers) are telling us is that they will almost certainly stop reading a lot more quickly than you think.

Apply “mental goosing” liberally: If you’re not writing something that can be told in a simple NVO structure (Packers beat Bears; Mayor loses election; Crash kills three), you need to make sure you can not only grab people by the eyeballs, but that you can keep them.

In discussing the “goldfish paradigm,” I often joke with my class that to keep things working well, I have to do something every 8 seconds or so to reengage them with the material. I basically have to “mentally goose” them or “give their brain a poke” if I want to keep them focused on what I’m telling them.

Narrative work is often misconstrued as “Write as long as you want because people will just curl up near a fireplace with your story and a nice snifter of cognac and read every last word you deign to provide. The truth is, the longer it is, the more chances you have to lose them.

As you read along, if you find there are pockets of writing in which your mind is drifting, you’re not goosing your brain. And you’re the one who was interested enough in the topic to write it, so chances are, the readers who are giving you a passing glance are already gone. Make sure there’s always something there to hold their focus or forces them to refocus on you if they drift.

Accentuate value quickly and clearly: I got the chance to talk to a student newsroom a week or so ago as part of their reporting training. One question I got was something most beginning journalists struggle with:

“How do you make speeches or meeting stories different or interesting? Because we cover a lot of those…”

Good question, but it reflects backward thinking.

I asked the student why they covered the things they covered, and I knew what was coming: We always cover them. OK, so why do you ALWAYS cover them? Well… because we ALWAYS cover them.

Cut the the moment of clarity: You keep going to events just because you’ve always gone there and looking for something interesting, even after you’ve been shown that nothing of interest is there, simply because people keep having events. That’s like fishing for trout in your bathtub because it’s frequently full of water and it’s conveniently located.

Instead, look for the value first: What’s going on there that your readers would WANT to hear about? If the answer is “Nothing,” then don’t go there.

If you have an answer (“A former football players is going to talk about his life after a dozen concussions” or “The city council is going to limit parking on streets around campus.”) go to the event and get that stuff. Then, write a story that would accentuate the value quickly and clearly:

“Four years of college football and five years in the NFL has left retired quarterback Jim Jenkins with the cognitive ability of a distracted 5-year-old, he said Tuesday night.”

“Students  living in the Weebly Heights section of campus can no longer park on the streets over night, after the Oshkosh Common Council approved a transit bill Tuesday night.”

In short, tell me why I should care about this right away. Otherwise, people are going to be less interested in paying attention and will quickly hop away to something more interesting.

If there’s any silver lining in the brain study stuff, it’s that people can get locked in quite strongly when you something that strongly affects their lives and they understand to what degree it actually does.

The hard part is making sure we’re doing that in everything we write.

“Is ‘pole-dancing girlfriend’s monkey’ properly punctuated?” and other weird things to ponder on a Tuesday

As noted many times before, whenever something weird happens in media, friends tend to hit me up with a “Did you see this? Thought it would be great for the blog!” message.

They are always right.

Let’s get into it.

Sometimes, a headline completely sells a story:

A friend sent this along last night with a note: “Just wanted to make sure you’ve seen this headline…”

I hadn’t but I’m glad he shared.

Not a huge fan of “allegedly,” as we’ve noted before, but other than that… I’m reading this thing.

 

When people tell you to “shut the f*** up,” I’m not sure this is what they mean:

The spelling error is bad, but it could have been worse: “Thank you for your copulation.”

 

This is spondifferious in its censoriousness and its ridiculousness

A friend sent this to me with a note: “Discuss?” My take: When you sound like someone mocking Mike Tyson’s speech pattern, maybe you should rethink your approach to whatever it is you’re doing.

 

If you say it three times, does Beetlejuice’s cousin, Improvejuice, show up?

A former student sent this along from a press release she was working off of:

Press release from the university, it was the second sentence:

“The Golden Eagles improved from 2019 as they improved their team average from 30:50.31 to 29:49.95, an improvement of over a minute.”

Think they improved? 

I don’t know… Can you tell it to me in a more concrete fashion?

 

And finally…

That’s DOCTOR LORD “FILAK, YOU A-HOLE” to you, pal!

I don’t know what Facebook has done to its algorithms, but I’m getting a lot of weird suggestions lately. A female friend I knew well in high school had a birthday recently and it suggested I send her a “BUTT-wiser” towel as a thoughtful gift. It also decided that apparently I needed to up my self-importance game a bit, so it suggested this:

I bet all the Scottish lords who shop at Costco get some serious respect from the sample ladies…

Have a good rest of your day

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

Word choices matter (or why a judge thought people who were shot to death couldn’t be called “victims” of the shooting)

Journalists must have a decent vocabulary to make sure they can communicate effectively to an audience. To assist my students in this regard, kids in my Feature Writing class have been required to smell or feel a mystery substance without being able to see it. They then have to generate 15 words that describe the sensation accurately and clearly.

(If you want to see the “Feel it” Lab or the “Smell it” Lab in action, feel free to click on those links.)

The point I was trying to make in those lessons was that distinctions in verbiage convey specific images to your audience. There’s a difference between “sticky” and “slimy”  or between “cool” and “cold.” In taking a whiff from the mystery bags, students found themselves debating among  the terms “scent” and “odor” and “stench.”

Distinctions like this can make the difference between a vivid word picture and a fuzzy mental image, but really can’t do much harm to the readers or the field. A recent court decision in Wisconsin, however, demonstrates how word choices can literally shape opportunities for justice.

Kyle Rittenhouse is on trial for his actions during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August. 2020. Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two of them, as part of a collection of citizens who came down to “monitor” the civil unrest that occurred after police officer Rusty Sheskey shot Jacob Blake seven times as  Blake was getting into his SUV. Rittenhouse is currently on trial for these shootings and the judge in the case made a specific requirement as to how participants in the case should refer to certain people involved:

During Rittenhouse’s upcoming trial on homicide charges, prosecutors must refer to the two people he fatally shot — Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber — and one he wounded — Gaige Grosskreutz — as Mr. Rosenbaum, Mr. Huber and Mr. Grosskreutz, or the people who were shot, or as to Rosenbaum and Huber, the decedents.

They may not be referred to as victims.

<SNIP>

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger countered by seeking to bar defense lawyers from calling the men “looters, rioters, arsonists or any other pejorative term.”

While looting, rioting and arson occurred in the two nights before the shooting, Binger argued that unless there’s specific proof Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were engaged in any of those actions, and that Rittenhouse had seen it, the labels are even more “loaded” than what judge ascribes to “victim.”

Schroeder was not swayed.

We have seen this problem before in how certain words can lead readers to have certain emotional reactions. The most famous one is this comparison of people during Hurricane Katrina trying to survive by scrounging for supplies. While the caption on the photo of the Black man shows him “looting,” the caption for the white couple has them “finding” supplies.

In both cases, people were taking items necessary to their survival from places without paying for them (primarily because everything was destroyed or abandoned at that time, and nobody showed up to run the register at the local convenience store). However, the “looting” tag carries with it a criminal vibe while the “finding” tag seems to indicate the people just were walking around and discovered the stuff under a pile of leaves on the sidewalk or something.

Feminist scholars have long noted the incongruity in language as to how men and women are described. A few common pairings include:

  • Women are “pushy” while men are “assertive”
  • Women are “bossy” while men “take charge”
  • Women are “stubborn” while men are “persistent”

We could go on for days, but the point is that language matters in how we tell stories. Here are a couple hints to improve your word selection when it comes to potential biases in language:

 

WOULD YOU USE THE DESCRIPTOR OF THE SITUATION WAS REVERSED?: One of the key ways to determine fairness in language or description is to turn the tables and see if it still works for you. My favorite example comes from Jim Bouton’s book, “Ball Four,” in which one of his teammates notes that he wouldn’t mind the papers referring to him as “the black first baseman” if only they would refer to his counterpart as “the white first baseman.”

The same is true of descriptions like “the female mayor” or “the woman CEO” and so forth. Calling attention unnecessarily to an attribute that you wouldn’t flip the other way is clearly an indicator that you might want to rethink that descriptor. I can’t remember seeing headlines about “the white quarterback” or “the male company president” and I bet most of you can’t either. Same thing with references to a “straight wedding” or a “cis gender politician.”

This doesn’t mean all descriptors of any kind like this should be ignored or eliminated. What it does mean is that you should think about why you’re doing what you’re doing and see if it makes sense.

 

DOES THE TERM HAVE A LOADED MEANING?: I can’t think of any time I’ve heard someone described as “a looter” or “a rioter” and had a positive reaction to that person. Those terms carry with them some negative baggage.  Conversely, I’ve seen an array of meanings ascribed to the term “clowning around” that range from bright and happy to racist.

Calling a member of the city council a “bureaucrat” can be technically accurate, as that person is a governmental figure, but it also brings up an image of someone who cares more about laws than people or who obstructs important actions by adhering to the letter of the law.

Calling a new policy a “reform” can be technically correct, as it will reshape the legal landscape in regard to the the way something is done, thus re-forming something. However, the term carries with it a positive meaning that leads people to believe something is a good idea. For example, a plan to cut benefits to working parents who are operating just above the poverty line can be deemed “welfare reform” and seen in a positive light.

The one I just saw that made me think was “unskilled labor.” In a post on this term, someone noted that all labor is skilled. If you took Bill Gates and stuck him with a road construction crew, he would be as lost as can be. If you took Jamie Dimon and put him in charge of a Naperville McDonald’s during lunch rush, he would probably end up with a crowd of really angry people and some severe grease burns. The term “unskilled labor” is meant to diminish the value of what certain people do and thus make it easier to discount them or pay them less.

All sorts of terms have a particular angle on them, such as “pro-life” for people who are against abortion rights, to “anti-death,” to people who opposed capital punishment. The question you need to ask is if your choice of words is providing bias or giving favor to a particular side of a debate.

 

DOES THAT WORD MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS: Whenever I’m writing and I’m half guessing at the meaning of a word, I’m mystically transported back to eighth grade and hearing my mother’s voice yelling from another room, “Look it up!  You’ve got a dictionary in there!”

Systemic Racism: “I Don&#39;t Think That Word Means What You Think It Means” – Crafted For All

We talked about this a bit during one of The Junk Drawer posts, where a reporter talked about this lead and word choice:

MILWAUKEE — In the immediate aftermath of a legendary performance to close out the 2021 NBA Finals and win a championship for the first time in his career, Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo declared that he signed his five-year, supermax contract extension prior to the season because “there was a job that had to be finished,” and that staying in Milwaukee meant doing it the “hard way.”

Aside from the 83 other problems we noted, the use of the word “aftermath” is wrong, given that it  means “the consequences or aftereffects of a significant unpleasant event.”

I still love the student who finally learned after years of using “penultimate” to describe something that was super-extra ultimate, the word actually meant “second to last.”

The point is to know the meaning of the word before you use it.

That’s an important point I hoped I emphasized in that penultimate paragraph.

Big McLarge Huge (Or how to improve the descriptive power in your writing)

(The headline is both a great description that lacks value and also a total excuse for me to include this clip from MST3K’s “Space Mutiny” where the actors mock actor David Ryder with multiple nicknames.)

Descriptions are often crucial in journalism, as your writing will be the only way in which your readers will experience something important. The ability to describe something well can help put the audience right next to you as you outline the excitement of a sporting event, the beauty of a sunset or the tension of a crime scene.

To improve description, we need to look for words that are both universally understood and yet specific in their purpose. We also need to avoid words that are vague, ill-defined or otherwise problematic. Here are a few places where we often fail and ways in which we can improve our efforts:

DESCRIPTORS THAT LACK COMPARISON: One of the easiest ways to describe one thing is to relate it to something familiar to the readers. That’s why metaphors and similes often work well in all forms of writing. Describing the face of an embarrassed person as being “red as a clown’s nose” or the torso of a stout person as “barrel-chested” work because we’re familiar with those items.

(Perhaps my favorite descriptor was a hyperbolic one in which Detroit Piston Rick Mahorn was said to be “the size of your average freeway overpass.”)

The descriptors that don’t work are the ones where we need some form of comparative and it’s not there. To make that point, I’ll ask a student who has used one of these comparatives how tall they are. It often goes like this:

Me: How tall are you?
Student: 5-foot-11
Me: Are you tall?
Student: Not really.
Me: Well, in a K-4 class, you’re a giant.
Student: OK, I guess I’m tall.
Me: But on an NBA basketball team?
Student: Yeah, I’m kind of short.

The point is with out a sense of comparison, I have no way of using the descriptor “tall” in a meaningful way. The same is true of “short” or “thin” or “fat” or “average” whatever else falls into that area.

Instead, find words that are more succinct or spend a few extra words to describe the person, place or thing in more detail.

DESCRIPTORS THAT ARE VAGUE: Specifics are often key to description, as this comparison shows:

VAGUE: “He needed to kill four zombies and he had a few bullets left.”
SPECIFIC: “He needed to kill four zombies and he had three bullets left.”

The vague one offers hope. The specific one says this guy is lunch.

Words like “many” or “some” or “few” lack value as do words like “enough” because they lack a concrete meaning for the people who are trying to understand what you want them to see. To improve this, find ways of using context, specific numbers or other similar means to give the readers a better sense of the situation.

VAGUE: Frank had a lot of bobbleheads.
SPECIFIC: Frank had 1,218 bobbleheads.

VAGUE: Jill had many friends attend her speech.
SPECIFIC: Jill’s friends packed the auditorium to hear her speak.

VAGUE: Jim didn’t have enough money.
SPECIFIC: Jim didn’t have the money to pay both his electric bill and his water bill this month.

Perhaps the greatest (or most pointless) word we use often is “very.” Grammarian Don Ranly was fond of telling students that if they wanted to use the word “very,” they should substitute the word “damn,” as it had exactly the same level of meaning:

“Bill was very lucky the fall didn’t kill him.”
“Bill was damn lucky the fall didn’t kill him.”

“Rashawn was very hungry before dinner.”
“Rashawn was damn hungry before dinner.”

DESCRIPTORS OF OPINION: As noted in previous posts, author Stephen King noted that “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” I’m not sure about that, but it is true that adverbs and other similar opinionated descriptors can do more harm than good in some situations.

Adverbs often convey the writer’s assessment of a situation, something that readers  or sources might not necessarily agree with. Consider the following:

“He  sustained only minor injuries, including a broken arm.”
“Fortunately, the firefighters limited the spread of the fire to half of the home.”
“The team clearly outperformed its opponent.”

In each case, I’m sure there could be an argument brewing from folks reading this stuff. A broken arm doesn’t seem like an “only” level of an injury. (I remember reading that, in sports lingo, a minor injury is one that happens to someone else.)

Even though the firefighters limited the fire, I doubt people feel fortunate about watching half their stuff go up in flames.

Finally, it’s unclear how clear that performance was or how it was defined. It could be by the score, the level of effort or some other such thing. Even more, maybe fans of the opponent would argue, “No, they just got lucky.”

A good way to fix this is to go hunting for those -ly words in your copy during your first edit. See if those words adequately augment what you’re trying to describe or if they just add conjecture or cause other problems.

Stories with holes: It’s not really journalism if you leave me with more questions than answers

10 Cities With the Big Bad Pothole Problems | Firestone Complete Auto Care

If your story looks like this, you’ve got problems.

Sunday morning had me facing my own level of mortality when my dad flashed the obituary section of the paper in front of me and asked, “Did you know this guy?”

Sure enough, I did.

Peter and I had gone to high school together and even been on the debate team at the same time. He was a year ahead of me and was wicked smart. He tutored me in geometry, a Herculean task to say the least, and he was the school’s valedictorian the year he graduated.

He went off to two Ivy League schools, earning a law degree and spending much of his career in patent law out on the West Coast. He died far too young, at age 47, which left me with the question I’m sure most people would have asked:

“How did he die?”

Despite my best googling and research skills, I couldn’t figure this out. I asked a couple people we held in common over the years, only to have them asking the same question I had. I even emailed his law firm and they didn’t have anything to tell me.

Which leads us to the point of this piece: Journalistic content shouldn’t have your readers asking crucial questions when they are done with the story. When I teach editing, I refer to stories that have this problem as having holes. The job of reporters and editors is to make sure the holes get filled or discussed before a story is published.

In the case of obituaries, we’ve discussed this before and explaining that they’re more for the living than the dead, so we need to make sure they serve as a complete telling of the person’s life. It should be clear that the story of the person’s life is the most important portion of the story, but it also remains the case that the only reason we’re telling it now is because the person has died.

(Side note: When I worked at a newspaper a long time ago, the local style guide dictated that an obituary written on anyone under the age of 70 included the cause of death whenever possible, as most people would be curious of what caused this person’s too-soon demise. I found an older edition of the style guide, which required the COD for those older than 60. Several of us surmised that our boss changed it when he got older, as he didn’t want to be in the “acceptable to be dead” demographic.)

(Second side note: I have told Amy that when I die, however I die, she needs to include the cause of death in my obituary. I don’t care if I died breaking my neck by falling off the couch trying to kiss my own butt as part of a TikTok challenge. If it mattered enough for me to die while doing it, tell people. I don’t need folks speculating…)

In the case of larger investigative stories, holes can unintentionally undermine the credibility of sources. When something is missing and readers have questions, they can become suspicious of the entire story.

Case in point: The Kansas City Star dropped a bombshell story of a former KU football player who stated that several of his former teammates harassed and threatened him and his family. The allegations included a teammate loosening the lug nuts of one of his car’s tires, teammates bursting into his apartment to threaten his family and the athletic department trying to buy his silence to the tune of $50,000.

The story mentions four players, but never names them.

I spent half the story wondering who these former KU football players were.

I spent the other half of the story why, if these allegations were credible, the paper didn’t name these dudes who attacked and threatened this kid.

Neither question got answered in the text, leading me to wonder more about the kid making the allegations and the author of the piece than anything else.

Filling in holes like this can allow the readers to make up their own minds about the credibility of sources, the seriousness of a situation and a dozen other things. However, when they are left hanging, they can’t exercise proper judgment.

I recall reading a story more than a dozen years ago about a small-town beef between a mayor and a city administrator over something the mayor had said. The administrator called it something like “the most offensive slur I have ever heard” while the mayor said it was something like “just a plain-folks saying that was being misinterpreted.”

I read the whole story, waiting to see what was said. The writer didn’t include it, didn’t clue me in on what it might be (a racial slur, a demeaning phrase describing people with disabilities, a sexist remark) and also didn’t tell me why that wasn’t included.

The fact I remember this, while I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, clearly demonstrates that holes can stick with a reader for quite some time.

Here are a few things you can do to find and fill holes that will have your readers thanking you:

CONVERSE WITH THE READER AS YOU WRITE: Journalism has long had a tradition of filling in 5W’s and 1H or checking off news values and considering the job done. Those elements still have value, but we really should be spending more time focusing on the needs of the audience.

After all, when those tenets were crafted, journalists usually knew their audiences intimately and the number of sources of information were far more limited than they are now. Audience-centricity was baked into the process back then and people couldn’t just hop on the internet and find answers to their questions elsewhere.

A good way to make sure that you’re working for the audience is to imagine a conversation with the readers when you are writing. You tell them the most important thing you can and then follow the thread of how you imagine that conversation will go:

You: Hey, your mom called. There was a fire at your house around 2 a.m.

Reader: OH NO! Is everyone OK?

You: No one got hurt because the smoke detector woke them up and they got out right away.

Reader: How bad was the fire?

You: The house is a total loss. Firefighters say more than $200,000 in damage.

Reader: How did this happen?

You: The water heater in the basement got a short circuit and started some oily rags on fire…

When you’re done going through the process, see if what you’ve written does what it needs to or if there are holes. Also, you can review the ordering of your content to see if it follows the pattern of what you think they’ll want to know first. This helps you avoid starting the story with “The Berlin Fire Department, assisted by volunteer firefighters from the town of Aurora, responded to a report of a fire at 111 S. Main St. around 2 a.m. Sunday…”

IF YOU GIVE THE READERS DIRECTIONS, MAKE SURE THEY CAN FOLLOW THEM: A number of stories will tell people to do something or avoid something or respond to something. These stories become problematic when people aren’t told how to do these things.

Back when the illness we were all freaking out about was the Swine Flu (H1N1), a local daycare had an outbreak and had to shut down. The people at the daycare told parents to watch their kids carefully for symptoms of the illness. In fact, the story on the outbreak mentioned this important activity at least three times in six paragraphs.

The problem? The story never said what the symptoms were, so that wasn’t really helpful at all.

A similar story I remember reading was back when Zoe was about 4 and she really had an interest in Santa. The local paper reported that breakfast with Santa, which was in danger of being cancelled, had been green-lit, thanks to a generous donor. The whole story talked about how kids were going to have breakfast with Santa and that it was so great we didn’t lose breakfast with Santa and how important breakfast with Santa was.

The story never once mentioned when and where the event was taking place. Did the writer expect parents to wander the streets of Omro, looking for a fat guy in a red suit?

In the digital age, we can, obviously, look up things like H1N1 symptoms or local events on a city website, but that’s not the point. If we’re supposed to inform readers about important things, we need to go all the way. Saying, “Well, they can look it up” is akin to listing Chicken Kiev on the menu at a nice restaurant, and then serving patrons bunch of raw ingredients and a recipe card.

IF YOU CAN’T (OR WON’T) FILL THE HOLE, ACKNOWLEDGE IT: Not all holes in stories come from poor writing and reporting. In some cases, information isn’t available. In other cases, a publication decides to err on the side of caution while reporting. Even more, the publication might have a policy that prohibits the publication of certain content.

In those cases, you’re going to leave a hole. When you do, explain what’s going on so your readers can follow along:

“At the family’s request, the name of the MegaJackpot winner will not be released.”

“The cause of death has not been determined, the medical examiner stated.”

“In accordance with the Daily Tattler’s policies, stories do not name assault victims and instead provide a first-name-only pseudonym.”

Explaining WHY the paper wasn’t naming names could have been really helpful Kansas City Star story:

“Due to the lack of supporting legal documents/At the request of the paper’s legal team/Because we believed the kid enough to run the story, but not enough to risk a libel suit, The Kansas City Star is not naming the four players accused of harassing Caperton Humphrey…”

At that point, I could figure out if this was a case of “The lawyers won’t let us, even though we have the goods” or a case of “This story’s hanging by a thread anyway, so let’s not make it collapse.” Knowing which way the wind is blowing on this story would not only satisfy my own curiosity, but it would also make me feel more or less willing to share it on my social media.

In the end, make sure you’re giving the readers the most complete picture possible, even if that means explaining why that picture is incomplete.

Throwback Thursday: Two Key Questions Every Story Should Answer Clearly For Your Readers

I’ve spent a lot more time watching nightly news during the pandemic than I usually did. What I have found is that a lot of local broadcasters do a good job of making the stories about legal wrangling over mask mandates, vaccine supplies and other COVID-related items amazingly clear and relevant to the audience.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for their text-based colleagues, who seem to want to get more into the minutia and less into the audience value than they should. With that in mind, I pulled up a Throwback Thursday post that might put us back on track in terms of keeping a story’s attention where it should be.

Two Key Questions Every Story Should Answer Clearly For Your Readers

One of the most important things to remember about media writing (or good writing in general) is that you aren’t writing for yourself. You are writing for your audience.

What makes for a good understanding of your audience, how best to reach your audience, how audience characteristics change your approach to writing and many other things have been covered thoroughly here before. Rather than rehash them, let’s boil everything down to two simple questions you need to answer for your readers:

  1. What happened?
  2. Why do I care?

This might seem overly simplistic, but then again so is the noun-verb-object structure and it works pretty well for most of us. To that end, think of these questions as the “core” of what you’re trying to do for your story, much in the same way that NVO provides the core for a good sentence.

QUESTION 1: WHAT HAPPENED?

To answer this question, you actually will want to start with some noun-verb-object construction to focus on the crucial aspects of the story you want to tell:

Brewers beat Cubs
Mayor blasts city council
University passes budget

The simplicity of each of these starter sentences provides you with the “who did what to whom/what?”  content you need to best inform your readers as to the core theme of the story they need to read. Beyond that, you start filling in the additional elements of the 5W’s and 1H to help them see more of what happened (How badly did the Brewers beat the Cubs? Why is the mayor ripping the city council? What is in the university’s budget?) and then you can move them along to the next point in the piece.

When it comes to what you add to this, it’s a lot easier to point out what NOT to do than it is to tell you what you SHOULD do. A few avoid-at-all-cost elements include:

  • Soft language: Simplicity is to be rewarded, so value concrete nouns and vigorous verbs. Don’t tell me someone “is no longer alive.” Tell me the person died. Don’t tell me a person “could potentially be found to be the robber.” Tell me “Police said Smith is a robbery suspect.” Direct and clear doesn’t mean cruel. (comedian George Carlin once noted that people should not be deemed “those with severe appearance deficits.” They’re just ugly.) It means being as clear as possible. Think about it this way, do you want your doctor telling you, “Well, it appears that you might have engaged in behavior that led to some significant health issues of the sexual nature which could potentially lead to some negative outcomes if not dealt with accordingly” when you go for an office visit? Or would you prefer: “You got an STI. Take this pill and you’ll be fine. Be more careful next time.”
  • Jargon: What makes for jargon is a lot like beauty: It’s often in the eye of the beholder. This is why understanding your audience matters a great deal. Getting “a pair of Hookers” in car speak means a significant upgrade to your exhaust system. Getting “a pair of hookers” in cop speak can mean 30 days in jail to five years in prison. Think about how likely it is your audience will understand a concept before you use it. In many cases, you can find simpler and clearer words that will avoid your need to use the jargon. If you can’t, you probably want to include at least some form of explanation to your readers. If you find yourself doing this more than once or twice per story, reconsider what you’re doing.
  • Self importance: Yes, marketing and branding are important elements of everything now, including news coverage. However, the more time you spend patting yourself on the back that you wrote something by including breathless statements like, “In an exclusive interview with the Star-Times” or “told the Herald-Press,” the less time you are spending telling people what they need to know. In many cases, you aren’t as exclusive as you think you are. In other cases, telling people that you guessed right first can really appear tasteless.

 

QUESTION 2: WHY DO I CARE?

This is the bigger one of the two, given that it’s easy to tell people what happened in most simple media-writing exercises. Why they should care? That involves understanding the audience well, understanding the impact of the topic at hand well and finding a way to pair the two successfully.

The first thing you have to understand is that something “being important” isn’t self-evident. The second thing you have to understand is that not everyone sees things the way you do. These issues came perfectly into focus for me once when a student wanted to write a story the UWO student newspaper about how the U.S. should annex Puerto Rico. Given the audience the paper serves, the lack of a newspeg and the general “WTH” reaction most of the staff had to the topic, I asked why our readers should care about this. The student’s response: “EVERYONE should care!”

Um… That’s not how this works.

While I was an editor at the Columbia Missourian at Mizzou, a colleague used to make students finish the sentence, “This matters because…” before the student could start the lead of the story. The point she wanted to make was: If you don’t know why it matters, you can’t tell me anything useful.

One of my more interesting moments involving the “this matters because” philosophy came here at UW-Oshkosh when our fundraising arm (the UWO Foundation) found itself in some hot water. At the time, the organization was considering bankruptcy and other unpleasant actions to deal with some serious financial problems. I remember asking my reporting students what they thought about the situation and they all stared at me blankly.

A subsequent conversation went something like this:

Student: Why should I care about this?
Me: How many of you get scholarships to attend UWO?
(All hands go up.)
Me: So where do you think most of that money is located?
Student: The foundation? So…
Me: Wait for it…
(Students all furiously start Googling UWO Foundation and Scandal)

As far as they knew, nothing going on over there mattered to them, which was the exact opposite of reality. In the end, things got resolved, but at the time it was worth at least a passing look for those students.

Look at every possible way you can think of to convey specific value to your readers when you are writing a story. Why should they care that the city council is raising property taxes? Maybe that means rents will go up. Why should they care about street construction? Maybe it means parking in their area will change. Why should they care about cuts to the health inspector’s budget? Maybe it means a little less inspection and some awful conditions at their local eateries.

The point is to find ways to relate what you are doing to your readers so they can see that your work has merit. It doesn’t have to come down to the level of a “See Dick and Jane” book, but don’t assume everyone knows what matters and why. Help them understand and care. This will improve their connection to the topic as well as to your media outlet in general.