I’ve said elsewhere on this site that the best way to become a better writer is to read more. I’ve gotten this piece of advice and I know others who’ve given it. One of the best ways to see how the basic elements of news writing can be applied to wildly different stories is to read, back to back, three very different pieces. For this exercise, I suggest reading the lead story on any major paper. The front page of a paper (online and in print) offers the biggest news stories of the day and there you’ll find straight, hard news. It might be local, it might be international. Then hit the features section of the paper. Check out The Arts section of the Times or, say, the Washington Post’s Arts & Living section, and read a review then another trend story. Then read a piece of long-form journalism in a magazine like The New Yorker or Esquire. (In The New Yorker nearly every article, save the reviews and pieces from Talk of the Town, is an example of long-form journalism.)
Now think about how different each piece reads. Find the nutgraf in each story and pay attention to how much each lede varies. Notice that some stories have nutgrafs that appear well below the lede, and others begin with the nutgraf. Notice how the nutgraf is more obvious in the news stories, than in the features or the magazine stories. All these stories rely on the basic elements of news writing, but do so in different styles. This exercise is good for giving a sense of the breadth of journalism, and how differently the rules of news writing can be applied.
More On How to Write Good News Stories:
- This piece from Poynter offering some general tips on writing good news stories
- This piece offers more tips on crafting news stories
- This piece, from University of Colorado, outlines the basics of constructing a news story