Noodling For News: Writing the Journalistic Article
by Becky Jacoby
Do people’s motives and actions perk your curiosity and intuition? Can you ask probing questions of strangers and remain objective? Can you discern essential nuggets from the big picture and distill details into a logical structure? Just as these skills help with plot development for fiction, they also underlie journalistic writing.
The difference is the purpose and structure
To start, retrieve that rusty high school geometry and picture an inverted triangle. Journalists write top-down. A pithy, hard-hitting headline draws the reader to paragraph one, the base of the triangle, heavy with critical facts that answer the five questions: who, what, when, where and how? Journalists expend effort on the headline and first paragraph since significant news facts come first. They also write to grab attention and meet space restrictions, though digital venues sometimes make this less of a concern. Leading with a quotation that summarizes the magic five is ideal but rarely occurs. In any case, an effective transition takes the reader to the body.
The mid-triangle or body of the news story contains subordinate paragraphs that provide more pertinent facts in order of importance. Quotations and characteristic elements here add credibility, personality and subject matter expertise. The length can vary. It depends upon source detail and intention. If longer than five paragraphs, divide the body by subheads to enable continuity. These brief emboldened phrases draw the reader to potential areas of interest as well as through content.
The apex of the triangle holds the conclusion or summary. Many news pieces merely fizzle, but an efficient ending leaves the reader satisfied—or daresay, hungry for more.
Hype or help?
Why does it seem that media cannot relate the news without bias? This likely occurs for three reasons. Most news stories are purposefully written with an angle or slant. Second, media succumbs to the reading public as a for-profit business. And last, news mostly involves people, and people’s activities and actions naturally evoke emotions and opinions.
However, journalists can write stories that touch others deeply. They can instigate a trend that spawns industry-wide change, like the widespread acceptance of e-readers, or spurs a movement like celebrity anti-bullying support.
Malcolm Gladwell tells of this type of phenomena in Tipping Point and Blink, andRobert Cialdini in Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion.
Truth or fiction?
Does writing a news story appeal to you? Is it less exciting than character transformation? The two forms of writing are not mutually exclusive. Authors have frequently ripped fodder from the headlines. The popular TV show Castle centers on a Richard Castle, a bestselling author who shadows a female detective then turns real cases into novels. Thanks to marketing (and ghostwriting), Heat Wave is the result.
Maybe journalistic writing pales in comparison to novel writing, but when the next news triangle causes you to noodle about a theme or drives a plot remember how “truth can be stranger than fiction.” ~BE
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A comment for Becky?
Becky Jacoby's nonfiction work appears in a variety of print and
online media. A speculative fiction writer, her short story "The Quilt
Lady" appears in the January 2012 issue of Other Sheep magazine.
