Journalists are taught how to write news, which means writing sensible copy that gets to important information as quickly as possible.
In hard-hitting news, there is no room for opinion, advice, humor, or comment. Most importantly, you must do without flowery writing and sparkling prose. It is not a literary masterpiece that will impress your readers. It is the information you give them.
A news story is a simplified article that tells your readers what happened or who said what. Writing good news is as much an art as piecing together invaluable prose into an elegant novel or thought-provoking poem.
And the best news writing involves the simplest words and the most basic sentence constructions. You’d be surprised how difficult some novice writers have when trying to perfect this simple formula.
Journalists write in a set pattern most of the time. It is a proven format that has remained largely unchanged for many years and successfully describes key information in the correct order.
While journalists from different organizations around the world can tweak the formula here and there, news writing generally involves elements.
1. Angle: a story without an angle is like a pizza without cheese. You try to bite into a pizza without cheese and all you get is … a sandwich. When you learn to write like a journalist, the first thing you need to learn is how to identify angles, which is indeed your subject and is the reason you are writing an article in the first place.
2. Introduction: Often called an intro or lead, this is the first paragraph or two of the story. While an angle defines what you’re going to write, your introduction actually goes ahead and puts it into words. Intros use the concept of who, what, when, where, why, and how to spread your story quickly.
3. Quote: almost all news stories have some kind of quote. A quote humanizes the story and also gives it authority. The best types of quotes support what you write in your introduction. Appointments must have the full name and title of the person being cited. Less ideal is “trusted source” or “spokesperson,” but it is sometimes unavoidable. News articles can be written without a citation, but this is not ideal.
4. Attribution – After dating, you should do everything you can to ensure that events are attributed to someone, especially if you were not on the scene. In court reports, this is extremely important, so in these types of stories you may see phrases like “they told the court,” “they told the court,” and “listened to the court.”
News writing is not like informational articles. In a news item, you solve the problem as soon as possible. How-to articles can identify problems and then offer a solution. In news writing, however, you don’t have time for this.
