Writing a news story

01

1. Establish what happened before you write anything

The first task is not writing. It is establishing, to your own satisfaction, what has actually happened and how you know. Write two lines in your notebook: the event, and the evidence for it. If the evidence line reads that somebody mentioned it, you are at the beginning of the reporting rather than the end.

Then establish the boundary of the story. A closure, a decision, a set of figures and a dispute about them are four different stories that often arrive together, and trying to write all four produces a piece with no top line. Pick the one you can stand over today and note the others as follow-ups. This decision costs five minutes and saves an hour of restructuring later.

Finally, decide the length before drafting. A four-hundred-word news item and a nine-hundred-word news feature are built differently, not merely trimmed differently. Length determines how many facts can carry their own paragraph, how much background survives and whether a second voice fits at all.

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2. Find the top line among competing facts

List the facts you hold, one per line, without ordering them. Then mark each with the consequence it carries: how many people it affects, how immediate it is, whether it changes something a reader was relying on, and whether it is new. The top line is the fact that scores highest, not the one you discovered last or found most surprising.

Two habitual mistakes distort this. The first is treating process as news: that a review has begun, that a body will meet, that a document has been submitted. Process is news only when the process itself changes something. The second is leading with the most quotable line, which puts a person's opinion above the material fact the opinion is about.

Test your choice by writing the headline first, in eight words, before the lede. If the headline is dull but accurate, the top line is probably right and the wording needs work. If the headline can only be made interesting by overstating, you have chosen the wrong fact or the story is thinner than you hoped.

03

3. Write the lede in one sentence

The lede carries one idea in one sentence, usually between twenty and thirty-five words. Draft it three times: once with the consequence first, once with the actor first, and once with the number first. Read all three aloud and keep the one that survives being spoken without a breath in the middle.

Put the attribution in or immediately after the lede. A reader who reaches the second paragraph should know who says this and on what basis. Where the source is a document, name the document rather than the fact of documentation, because a named report can be looked up and a reference to a report cannot.

Cut in this order: adjectives, adverbs, throat-clearing phrases, then any clause that answers a question the reader has not yet asked. What remains is usually the lede. If the sentence still needs a comma-heavy subordinate clause to make sense, the second idea in it belongs in paragraph two.

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4. Build the second and third paragraphs

The second paragraph does one of three jobs: it supplies the precision the lede had to omit, it identifies the source fully, or it delivers the second most consequential fact. Choose deliberately rather than continuing to write. In practice, precision is the most common correct choice, because ledes are necessarily simplified.

The third paragraph is usually where the response belongs if there is criticism in the first two. Placing it there protects the story from becoming one-sided when it is cut, and it also demonstrates that the response was sought rather than appended. State when and how it was sought if none was received.

By the end of paragraph three the reader should have the event, the evidence, the scale and the counter-position if one exists. Read those three paragraphs alone and ask whether somebody could repeat them accurately. That test, applied honestly, catches more structural faults than any other.

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5. Handle quotations properly

Quotations do work that reported speech cannot: they carry voice, they commit the speaker to their own words, and they let a reader judge tone. They are poor at carrying figures, dates and technical description, which are almost always clearer in your own words with the source named.

Introduce a quotation with the speaker and their standing, not with a characterisation of what they are about to say. Never build a quotation from parts of two separate answers, and never repair grammar inside quotation marks beyond removing verbal filler, which should itself be done consistently and sparingly. Square brackets mark any word you have inserted for sense.

Check every quotation against the recording or the note, including where the sentence starts. Most quotation disputes concern a fair sentence with an unfair beginning: a clause removed from the front changes a conditional into an assertion. Note the timestamp beside each quotation you use, so that a later query takes seconds rather than an evening.

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6. Measure the shape

Two proportions describe a news draft usefully. The first is the share of the text spent on the opening: in a tight hard-news item the lede is roughly five to twelve per cent of the words, which for a four-hundred-word story means around twenty to forty-eight words. Above that band the opening is usually holding a second idea; below it, the opening is usually missing the consequence.

The second is average sentence length. Newsroom habit sits between fifteen and twenty words a sentence, with anything consistently above twenty-five reading as heavy and anything consistently below ten reading as staccato. Neither figure is a rule. They are diagnostics: a draft far outside both bands usually has a structural cause worth finding.

The meter below does the arithmetic. Type the word count, the length of your lede, a reading speed and the number of sentences, and it reports reading time, lede share against the reference band, and average sentence length. It reads nothing and judges nothing.

Story-structure meter

07

7. Seek the response before you file

If your story says something adverse about an identifiable person or organisation, they should have a real opportunity to respond before publication. Real means specific: put the substance of what you will publish, not a vague enquiry, and give a deadline that is achievable for the size of the organisation you are asking.

Record the approach precisely: the time, the channel, the person or address contacted, the substance put, and the deadline given. If no response arrives, the story says so in those terms rather than reporting that the organisation refused to comment, which is a different and often untrue claim.

Read any response against your draft rather than simply appending it. A response sometimes reveals that a figure was misunderstood or that the decision was taken by a different body, in which case the story changes rather than gaining a paragraph. That is the response doing its job.

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8. Cut, then cut from the bottom

Almost every first draft is fifteen to twenty per cent too long, and the surplus is predictable: adjectives, sentences that restate the previous sentence, background a reader does not need for this story, and quotations kept because they were hard to obtain. Remove those before touching structure.

Then test cuttability. Delete the last third and read what remains: a name should not have lost its explanation, a figure should not have lost its comparison, and no right of reply should have disappeared. If any of those happened, move the material up rather than protecting the length.

Finally, read the whole piece backwards, paragraph by paragraph. Reading against the grain of the narrative is uncomfortable and that is exactly why it exposes ordering faults, repetitions and paragraphs that exist only because you wrote them in that order.

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9. Furniture, captions and the last checks

Write the headline again now that the story is finished, because the top line has often shifted during drafting. Check that the headline is supportable by the first three paragraphs alone, that any contested claim in it is attributed, and that it has only one plausible grammatical reading.

Caption every image with who, what, where and when, written from what you know rather than from what the picture seems to show. Check that captions and text agree on names, numbers and sequence, since a mismatch between them is one of the commonest published errors and one of the easiest to catch.

Then run the accuracy pass against the notes, not from memory: names, job descriptions, place names, dates, figures and their bases, and the spelling of every proper noun. Confirm internal consistency, particularly where a figure appears in both the text and a caption or table.

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10. File cleanly and note what is outstanding

Send the story in the form the desk expects, with the headline variants, the captions attached to the right files, and a short note of anything still to come. State plainly what is unverified and what you have hedged, because a sub-editor who does not know a hedge is deliberate will tidy it away.

Keep your material together: notes, recording, verification log, the version you filed and the response correspondence. Note the retention period. If a query arrives a fortnight later, everything needed to answer it should be in one place and should not depend on your recollection.

Then write the follow-up line: what the next story is and what it needs. The best moment to identify that is immediately after filing, while the gaps are still obvious, and it is the habit that separates a single item from a continuing piece of coverage.