CHAPTER 8
	Stories

Charles Osgood, of CBS News, says we should think of broadcast writing in terms of music. “Good writing has to be musical, with a sense of balance, a sense of beauty, melodic, a sense of phrasing.” As with music, sentences should be constructed in a “graceful way.” As with music, “the beginning should sound like the beginning and the end should sound like the end.”

The point is, we call them stories, and we do best telling them that way. It doesn’t apply to every item in the news. There are timely events that simply require a straightforward recitation of significant information—well written and constructed. But they’re still stories.

The story is the product of all those words, phrases and sentences. There is no one right way to tell a story. Regrettably, there are considerably more wrong ways than right ones. Most stories that don’t work start out badly and never recover. That’s why the lead is so important. The keys are thinking and planning. If you figure out both how you’re going to start the story and how you’re going to end it before you start writing, you’re most of the way home.

Stories also frequently fail because they’re illogical in telling the information. Call the concept story logic. The phrase is easier said than explained, but it starts with understanding the story itself.

PLAN AND FOCUS

Why Run the Story?

Why should this story go on the air? If you can’t answer that question, the rest is probably hopeless. There are lots of plausible answers.

The story is of sufficient importance to the audience that it needs to be in the news:

 

• A chemical spill that endangers people

• A major plant closing

• The results of the day’s election

 

The story is useful to the audience for day-to-day living or long-range survival, sometimes called “news you can use”:

 

• Consumer stories

• How to make your way through new highway construction

• Surviving unemployment

 

The story is particularly interesting or particularly unusual:

 

• Senior citizen beauty contestants

• The wranglings over whether someone can keep his pet alligator at home

• The dramatic rescue of a young child (not in your area)

 

The story involves important and/or well-known people:

 

• Almost anything the president does

• A big-name celebrity visits your town

• The high-profile leaders and leading characters every community has

 

Other reasons are possible. Other factors such as timeliness or proximity certainly enter into the decision. Think about why the story should be on the air, and think about what’s new in the story because the lead must address the issue of why the audience should care now.

Former network correspondent Deborah Potter says there are two steps to follow before you actually start writing. The first is to answer the question, “What is this story really about?”

It’s not enough to say what happened, she says. It’s what happened, and what are we supposed to make of that? What does that mean? Come up with a focus statement that’s short and tight. Potter says that if describing that focus takes more than one sentence, you’re not yet ready to write the story.

Former NBC correspondent Don Larson says you should be able to determine the focus because, “It will make you smile, it will make you shake your head in disgust, it will make you sense a shared truth. It might make you think of your own neighborhood, your own childhood, your own family.”

In a story about a kid in juvenile detention, Potter says the focus statement might be, “Ernie survives jail.” Or maybe, “Jail breaks Ernie.” Once you figure out the narrow focus, get rid of everything that doesn’t fit. That includes bites you collected along the way. Even good bites, if they’re not right on point, have to go.

Do You Understand?

Do you understand all the aspects of the story? Nothing you don’t understand will ever get clearer on its way to the audience. If you don’t fully understand what’s happening in the story and the answers to all of those basic who, what, when, where, why and how questions, then you’re not ready to start writing anything. If there’s something in the story you don’t understand, you have three choices: get the issue(s) cleared up, drop the part you don’t fully understand or drop the story. If you don’t understand something, it’s inconceivable that the audience will.

The following story, word for word, went on the air on a top station in a top 10 market:

Even leaving aside some serious writing problems, it’s clear that the writer had no idea what this story was really all about. Neither did any of the people who heard it. You’ll also notice that I’m not providing a corrected version of the story. That’s because I can’t figure it out either.

And this story must have left its midwestern (but nowhere near Chicago) audience a bit puzzled:

That story is at least understandable; it just suffers from inadequate thought in the telling. Why split up the takeoffs and landings? And because this story was broadcast outside of Chicago, the far greater local effect would be on flights going in to Chicago from the city where this broadcast took place. That’s the primary local story, along with the secondary effect of planes from Chicago that don’t get to land in your local city. Either start with the local story:

BETTER:

Make sure you call ahead before heading out to the airport today. We’re feeling the effects of a fog-inflicted shut down at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. …

or at least combine the Chicago information:

BETTER:

Dense fog has virtually shut down Chicago’s busy O’Hare Airport. …

The problem in the original O’Hare story is nothing compared to the following story, which went on the air, exactly as written, on a large-market TV station:

Having a news anchor offer advice like this is frightening. Among other things, the market is never ripe for the picking; most people think of six thousand dollars as a lot of money; and short-term options are among the riskiest investments someone can make. This story went well beyond both the reporter’s area of knowledge and the proper role of a journalist. Don’t write what you don’t know.

What’s the Story About?

Think what the story is about. Remember, we’re still talking about all the things you need to do in your head (or on paper if it’s complicated) before you actually start writing. While you’re writing is no time to be thinking about where you’re headed; you need to know that beforehand.

That’s a lot harder than it sounds. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by facts and try to deal with information in the sequence in which you collected it rather than digesting the whole thing and figuring out the story. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. Collect all the information, figure out what the story is really all about and then figure out how you’re going to tell the story—the whole story.

 

THE FACTS: A young girl gets out of a defective child restraint, wanders from her yard and falls into a river. She is pulled out by her father, revived by mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a neighbor and taken to a local hospital by paramedics.

The facts are simple enough, but should this be a story of safety, survival or rescue? Since you can’t say everything in a lead, what is most likely to capture the attention of the audience? The issue isn’t as simple as choosing the right path versus the wrong one. It’s picking a single, simple story to concentrate on.

 

THE FACTS: A small fire breaks out in a service room, filling apartment building corridors with smoke, upsetting residents of the senior citizens’ complex, who must leave their apartments and wait outside in the cold while the fire department deals with what turns out to be a minor fire resulting in little damage.

Is there a story here at all? If so, what part of it would get anyone’s interest and attention in a lead?

What’s the Lead?

Find the lead. A story that’s broadcast because of its importance, newsworthiness or usefulness will most often demand a fairly straightforward lead. If you’ve selected the story properly, that kind of information should capture the attention of the audience. A story that’s broadcast because of whom it’s about should obviously include the who in the lead. A story that’s broadcast because it’s unusual or interesting frequently allows more leeway in how you get into it. But don’t confuse leeway with sloppiness. This kind of story is harder to write because the facts of the story won’t write themselves. You’ve got to sell them. See Chapter 7 for more on leads and endings.

In What Order Do You Tell the Story?

We tell stories to one another in a manner in which we think the other person will best understand. If we do that face to face, we have the advantage of visual and perhaps oral feedback. We can usually tell whether the person we’re speaking to understands and cares, and we can adjust accordingly. We don’t have that feedback in this business. We have to think about the story from the standpoint of the audience the whole time we work on it. Generally, after an appropriate lead, telling stories chronologically will be easiest on the audience. That means that we first get the audience’s attention with a strong lead. We then tell the story from beginning to end, in the same sequence in which it actually happened.

GOOD LEAD AND BEGINNING:	Two men teamed up for a dramatic rescue of a young girl today. Six-year-old Sally Jones … [starting at the beginning and going to the end of that sequence of information from earlier in the chapter]
GOOD LEAD AND BEGINNING:	Clouds of smoke drove elderly residents from their apartments today. It all started … [again, from the beginning to the end of the information given earlier in the chapter]
GOOD LEAD AND CHRONOLOGICAL STORY DEVELOPMENT:	Police have arrested an unemployed truck driver for yesterday’s robbery at the Jones Trucking Company. Police say John Smith went in to see his former employer armed with a sawed-off shotgun. An employee at the firm said the robber demanded all the money kept in the company safe - - and that he threatened to shoot anyone who moved. Police say Smith made off with two-thousand dollars, which police say they recovered in Smith’s south side apartment this afternoon.

Note that after the lead—which is a simple statement of what took place—all the information is relayed in the same sequence as it happened. Note also all the attribution in the last story. It feels a little cumbersome, but each one is necessary to avoid your accusing Smith of a crime. See attribution in Chapter 5 and the crime and legal section of Chapter 20, “Reporting: Specialized Coverage.”

This isn’t the most creative story, but it’s a clean, clear, straightforward development that will be easy for the audience to follow and understand.

Here’s another example of a story that takes an unfortunate turn out of sequence:

ILLOGICAL SEQUENCE:

Meantime, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama is planning a stop in Ohio on his way to the Democratic National Convention next week. The convention begins a week from today in Denver, and Obama’s schedule calls for him to be in Columbus on Sunday. Campaign officials say he’ll talk about opportunity, contrasting the state’s long ties with the railroad industry with Ohio’s troubled economy.

Here we have a few problems. The lead is acceptable, but the writer lost track of what story she was telling after that. The story is supposed to be about Obama’s trip to Ohio, but after the lead, the writer tells us about the convention instead. That’s better handled in an information ending. There’s also a problem in the last paragraph, which really doesn’t make any sense. What’s the relationship between the railroad industry and the economy? The reporter may know, but the audience won’t.

BETTER SEQUENCE:

Meantime, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama plans a stop in Ohio on his way to the Democratic Convention next week. Obama is scheduled to appear in Columbus on Sunday … where he’s expected to talk about how to bring more and better jobs to Ohio’s ailing economy. The Democratic convention begins a week from today in Denver.

STORY LOGIC

Handling the Basics

As reporters, every statement we hear leads us, or should lead us, to the next logical question. We want answers to all of the who, what, when, where, why and how questions, but we don’t ask those questions at random. Each one has its place. The same is true when we’re writing the story for the audience. As we go along, logical questions come up in the minds of the audience. If each succeeding line in our story answers the next logical question in the minds of the audience, we have achieved story logic.

The story starts with a hard lead: what happened. The second sentence really functions as part of the lead, splitting up material that would overload the sentence if written all together. The lead said the weed killer is controversial. Sentence three must explain why. Having said that officials did this controversial thing and what the potential hazards are, the next logical question is why then did officials spray? The last sentence answers that and brings the story to a logical information/future ramification close.

The story above is tight and straightforward, but it’s certainly not the only way to deal with the information. Alternative leads include:

The first alternative will require that line two explain what the new method is. The second will require line two to explain why. The point is that every line you use in a story takes the listener or viewer deeper into the information, and each line should lead logically into the next. Where that logical flow doesn’t exist, there’s a problem.

This clean, clear story starts with a soft main point lead. Line two gives the specifics of what’s taking place, followed by what could be an answer to the question Can this work? The story ends logically with a future ramification close. Nice, straightforward story.

Will It Stand on Its Own?

Every story should be able to stand on its own, as if it were the first time the audience ever heard about the subject. Although we should not underestimate the audience’s intelligence, we cannot overestimate the audience’s knowledge and background on a story. Newspeople talk to themselves too much; most people don’t follow the news with the kind of interest and intensity that reporters do. Many people receive only bits and pieces of news for days at a time—or longer. People frequently miss the news completely.

With a few exceptions for major, ongoing stories, think of each story as taking the audience from a clean slate to some measure of understanding. The lead line takes the audience from point A (nothing) to point B (some new information). Point B should include, depending on the kind of story it is, something of the significance of the item—why it’s on the air. Having written the lead, stop. Think about where you’ve taken the audience. The choices for line two are limited. You’ve raised certain questions in the lead; you’ve given partial explanations in the lead. What’s the next logical question? The answer to that is line two. Now that you’ve taken the audience from A to B to C, stop again. Where will you go next? Use this process all the way through the story. If your answers to logical questions come when the questions do, you’ve achieved story logic.

WHAT HAPPENED:	The city council today voted to raise property taxes by 20 percent.
WHAT IT MEANS:	If signed into law, the cost to a homeowner with an average 100-thousand dollar house - - an extra 220 dollars a year.
WHY— AND ONE SIDE:	Council chairman John Smith proposed the tax hike - - saying it was the only way the council could balance the city budget.
WHY NOT— THE OTHER SIDE:	Council member Jennifer Jones was the lone dissenter in the five to one vote. She warned that the tax hike will drive businesses out of the city.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT:	The mayor did not attend the meeting - - and has not said whether he’ll sign the measure.

Answer the Logical Questions

Never leave logical questions unanswered. Some people will always want more detailed information about a given story. That’s not the issue. The issue involves logical questions that a good portion of your audience is likely to wonder about. It might be the possible effects of something; what someone thought about the event; why the person did that anyway. Sometimes you don’t know the answer to a logical question, as in the example above on the mayor’s position. Then say so. But don’t ignore it. If it’s not in the story, there’s no telling what the audience will assume, but there’s no guarantee they’ll assume you would have told them if you knew. In the story above, leaving out the last line would leave a logical question unanswered. Even though the mayor’s position is unknown, the audience knows that it has all the answers the reporter has. Remember that the audience looks to you for answers. That’s your job.

After inaccuracies and confusion, leaving logical questions unanswered is the next greatest sin in news writing. Look at the problem created in the following story, which ran on a large-market television station:

But what happened to the tense situation? What happened when the officers found themselves face to face with four kids armed with semiautomatic weapons? That’s likely to be exactly what the audience was thinking about as the rest of the story slid by unnoticed. The writer needed just one more line to take the audience, logically, from the tense situation to the aftermath.

STORY STRUCTURE

Make the Writing Structure Interesting

Vary sentence length and structure. As noted in Chapter 6, there are only so many words that can be read well together, but if sentence after sentence is structured the same way grammatically and close to the same length, the story will sound choppy and boring. Be careful with sentence structure variations, though. You still need to keep sentences short and simple, or they’ll be confusing. Go back to the city council story on page 93. It’s a short, simple story, but notice the variation in sentence length and structure even in a quick story like that.

The story is reasonably clear and told in the right sequence, but it’s boring and badly in need of some writing variation and connector words to smooth it out:

What made the second version better? The second version took the first two identically structured, passive sentences and combined them into two short sentence fragments without the weak to be verbs. The resulting lead is one-third shorter than the original two sentences—and a lot punchier. The next sentence of the new version again combines two sentences of the original version while tightening up the writing. In fact, the new version trims the wording of the middle of the story by almost half. The new version and the original start the next sentence exactly the same, but the new version adds new information—that hydrochloric acid is a dangerous chemical—and answers a logical question that was unanswered in the original: Did the chemical cause a problem? The revised version then combined the last two sentences of the original using a conjunction (but) to smooth out the copy. The second version of the story actually contains more information, reads better and is still a little shorter than the original.

TRANSITIONS

Use transitions to smooth out the writing.

Within Stories

Within stories, transitions help the audience understand the story better by drawing connections and improving the flow. Transitions express:

Look at how the use of transitions helps to smooth out this copy and draw connections and contrasts:

The story uses three conjunctions. The first one serves more to provide a breathing point than anything else. The next two—one but and one and—serve to smooth out the copy by drawing a contrast between two facts in one case and adding additional information in the other.

Make sure you use conjunctions correctly. The following examples, which were actually used on the air, were more likely to puzzle the audience.

PROBLEM:

The project will be built over the next 10 years, and won’t start for several months.

Given that the above two bits of information are really contrasting, the conjunction should be but, not and.

BETTER:

The project will be built over the next 10 years … but won’t start for several months.

The correct conjunction helps the audience understand what’s taking place.

PROBLEM:

They arrested one man, but another man in the house tried to run out the back door but was met by SWAT officers.

The second but does its job well—contrasting situations. But because the second man was arrested, too, the first but really doesn’t make any sense. In fact, the audience is likely to be confused because the word sets up the idea that the guy got away. Better to drop that first but completely:

BETTER:

They arrested one man. Another man in the house tried to run out the back door but was met by SWAT officers.

This version will be far easier for the audience to follow.

PROBLEM:

No charges have been filed against the 16, but officials say most were in their late teens and early twenties.

Don’t force transitions and connections where they don’t exist. Since there’s really no known relationship between the filing of charges and the ages of those arrested, the but connecting the otherwise unrelated parts of the story simply confuses the audience. Drop it:

BETTER:

No charges have been filed against the 16. Officials say most are in their late teens and early twenties.

In this case, the copy is clearer with no transition.

PROBLEM:

Applications from foreign students for the upcoming semester are down 30 percent over last year.

The idea that something can be “down … over” just doesn’t sound right. Better to tighten the copy and change the preposition.

BETTER:

Applications from foreign students are down 30 percent from last year.

Conjunctions help the flow of the story, but only if they’re used correctly. Make sure you’ve used the right transition word to describe what’s happening in the story.

Between Stories

Because we don’t run stories individually in a vacuum, we also use transitions between stories in an attempt to have one story flow into the next.

Too often, we forget that a newscast is really only organized chaos. The stories we call news really are related only by the decision that a given collection of material should go on the air, rather than the many other choices available. Taken from that standpoint, anything we can do to make the journey through the news a little easier can only help the listener and viewer.

Transition lines can help light the path of the newscast and make it easier to follow. Only two things legitimately connect news stories. One is geography; the other is subject. Stories that are connected by either of these common bonds should flow one from the other more logically than stories that have nothing in common. But don’t force the transition as this large-market writer did in the last line of a story on a single-engine plane crash:

PROBLEM:	Tonight, the F-A-A is trying to figure out why the plane crashed and killed the two men.
	Thousands of people on the East Coast are not worried about air safety in lieu of the Smith Airlines strike. …

In other words, there is no connection between the content of the two stories. A forced and inappropriate transition just sounds stupid—like this bizarre “transition” in the last line of a story on wrong information from IRS personnel:

PROBLEM:

Anyway, they say they won’t hold you to blame for wrong answers if you can document the name of the person you talked to, the question you asked, and the date of the call. You won’t find much wrong with Ohio’s wineries. It’s becoming very big business …

Charitably, these are forced transitions. The first example is really irresponsible. The Smith Airlines story (I’m protecting the name of the innocent airline) that night had absolutely nothing to do with safety. The writer raised the issue in the lead line, in the negative, only for the purpose of contriving a transition. But given that both stories related to aviation, the writer really didn’t need a transition at all. The second example is just plain dumb.

Related stories should be easy to handle, like the opening line of a story about people who work on Labor Day, after a story about the holiday itself:

A line like that means a virtually seamless transition from one story to the next.

Even a single word and short phrase can help the flow:

Individual reporters and anchors may handle each story beautifully, but if someone isn’t looking at how they fit together, the show just won’t flow. That’s the job of the producer.

Transitions can smooth the flow from one story to the next, but those transitions have to be logical. If they’re not, just move on to the next item in the newscast. See more on this and newscasts in general in Chapter 17, “Producing News on TV.”

BEFORE YOU’RE DONE

Does the Story Support the Lead?

The lead of a story is like a headline: It catches our interest and attention. If the rest of the story doesn’t support it, you’ve butchered either the lead or the rest of the story.

Will the Audience Understand?

Remember that as reporter, writer or producer, you’re close to the story. Even if you do understand the information, there’s no guarantee the audience will. Too often, what we know about a story never fully makes it onto the written page. Especially in complicated stories, as we read over what we’ve written, we may internally supplement what we actually write with information that only we know. Unfortunately, the audience can’t do that. Always go back and make sure you’ve answered all the logical questions and that what you know and mean to say really got down on paper in the manner you intended.

Other than party officials or students of government, it’s inconceivable that members of the audience could have understood what this story was about— although it did go on the air, word for word, as printed above. This is a much-too-shortened version on the complicated controversy of reapportionment. The writer may well have understood the issue, filling in the many gaps in written information with the background and knowledge within the reporter. The audience would have had no idea what this story meant.

Contrast that with this nicely handled version of a fairly complex story:

Note the use of short, clear sentences and the back-and-forth approach to the issues: one side and then the other side. Nice, clear summary of a complicated story.

Use Humor Sparingly

If you’re really good at humor, you should probably be a comedian. Few news-people are nearly as funny as they seem to think they are. Use humor sparingly and only when it’s clearly appropriate.

PROBLEM:	Those of you who work at Smith Instrumentation and its neighbor, Jones Company, might want to call the boss before work tomorrow. Both places are pretty well gutted tonight. …
PROBLEM:	A knock-down, drag-out fight between two women ended in gunfire tonight on the west side. Witnesses tell us a woman named “Vicki” lost the fight in the first round at the Green Apartment complex. And then won the second round … not with her fists … but with a gun.

Other than changing the names, both of the above stories went on the air as written. They shouldn’t have. People who have been thrown out of work and those who have lost everything they’ve worked for in the first story will find little that is cute or amusing about the situation. And getting shot is seldom funny. Misplaced humor is offensive.

Read the Story Aloud

Always read your story aloud before it goes on the air. That’s the only way to tell:

 

• Real length. Numbers, especially, can easily make a computer’s automatic timing highly inaccurate. To a computer, it takes the same amount of time to read the as it does to read 999.

• Whether the lines can really be read comfortably and with proper emphasis.

• Whether you have words that are difficult to pronounce without sounding awkward (try desks for example).

• Whether you’ve misspelled any words (assuming your errors were oversights rather than ignorance).

 

SUMMARY

Most stories that don’t work either start out with bad leads and never recover or try to convey information in an illogical sequence. To figure out how to tell a story, think about why you’re running the story, what’s new that the audience didn’t know about, what’s the lead and what’s a logical sequence. The three biggest problems in storytelling are inaccuracy, confusion and not answering logical questions. Make the writing more interesting by at least some variation in sentence length and structure and use transitions to smooth out the writing.

KEY WORDS & PHRASES

 

why run the story?

what’s new to the audience?

do you understand all the facts?

what’s the story really about?

what’s the lead?

what’s the best sequence to tell the story?

story logic

answer the logical questions

story structure

transition—within story and between stories

 

EXERCISES

A. Convert the following random bits of information into coherent 30-40 second broadcast stories. For this assignment, imagine that you’re a reporter in Springfield.

 

B. Now convert those random bits of information (above) into coherent 20 second broadcast stories.

C. This assignment is about attribution (and good writing). Reread pages 51–54 on attribution … and the crime and legal section of Chapter 20, “Reporting: Specialized Coverage” before you start.

The following information comes from the Springfield police. Rewrite it, using correct broadcast style, good writing, logical story development, proper attribution and a reasonable slug.