The Process of Writing News : From Information to Story

Life is more than a series of isolated incidents. Things relate to other things, problems continue, issues arise, persist, are sometimes resolved. If we don’t know that intuitively, most of us figure it out by the time we are adults. If it is to be helpful, the news is like that, too. In this book you will have to deal with ongoing issues, you will keep revisiting some of the same people, and you will report events that build on previous events until resolution. Part of good journalism is reminding audiences of how they already know the people and issues you are telling them about. To give you some idea of how that works in a journalist’s job I have made up an entire community. The idea has been tried before in journalism teaching. For example, both Auburn University and the University of Florida have used something like it in home-grown lab exercises, and it was the basis for Ken Metzler’s Newswriting Exercises more than 30 years ago