Welcome back. This time we're going to be talking about the most basic skill in journalism, that is to say, structuring a news story. It's a very artificial way to tell a story. Hardly any of us in other walks of life, if we were talking to our families, if we were giving a lecture at a university, if we were writing a report, would write it the way a new story's written. It's a highly artificial structure. But it was invented to get the most important news out quickly at the top, and to put the least important stuff down at the bottom. So that in ancient days when newspapers were published in hot metal and letter press, the material that was superfluous could be easily cut from the bottom just by pulling chunks of lead out of the story, or lines of type out from the bottom of the story. So it was very pragmatic. Get the important stuff out first and allow any superfluous material to be cut from the bottom. Now, this artificial structure imposes some demands on us. Firstly, we've got to identify what the newsiest fact or facts might be, and pluck them out from wherever they might come in the narrative, they might come towards the end of an ordinary narrative, and stick them up the top. We must start with those. And then, it poses a second demand on us, which is to then reorganise all the rest of the information so it follows a coherent structure. One of the ways that people have to try to describe this is the inverted pyramid. And the idea is that the lead, the big fact, makes the big splash across the broad base of the pyramid, and then lesser information is arranged underneath it in that kind of coherent order that I've been speaking about. And you can see how in a newspaper you could just chop that stuff called lesser details off at the end. There's lots of things that news is not. Firstly, it's not an essay. And that little quote there helps to make the point that often people take in information impressionistically. And for that reason it's very important that we write with the most vivid and important information right at the top. Because, as Julianne Shultz says there, for lots of people, most of the time, the media is a little more than a background hum, you've gotta try to engage them. News is not fairy tales. There's the way in which the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears starts in the nursery rhyme book. Once upon a time there were three bears, we don't write news copied like that. We would write, a 10-year-old girl is recovering in the children's hospital after being chased by three bears. That's the guts, they're the big facts. And it's not a news judgement. Lawyers, whatever other merits they may have often not very urgent writers. And here we have a statement saying, Mr John Langley Hancock and a number of other parties, very vague, are parties to an arbitration. So the word parties turns up twice in three words. That's not the way to write news copy. The building blocks of news are those five W's and the one H. So what, when, who, where, why and how. Now, we can't often answer the how, or even sometimes the why question, but in more or less all news stories we should be able to say what happened, when, to whom, and where. And we really need to answer those questions. The hardest part of writing any news story is writing the first paragraph, or what we call the intro or the lead. And there, there are a few rules for this. They look simple, but they're not simple to execute. Firstly, try to identify the key, simple fact, the standing out fact or set facts that makes this a story. Keep it short. Lots of newspapers have a rule that says, the intro shouldn't be more than 25 or 30 words. Now sometimes you can go a bit more than that, but they need to read easily and naturally. If they're convoluted, complicated, difficult to absorb, your reader will probably just move on to the next story. And in doing so, answer as many of those five Ws and one H that you can. Now, there was this aviation catastrophe in 2014, which can easily be summarised in fewer than 30 words, and, there it is. A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 crashed in eastern Ukraine yesterday, killing all 298 people on board. We've got a lot of information in there. We've got the basic fact of the crash. We know the name of the airline. We know the, the aircraft type. We know where it crashed. We know when it crashed. And we know who was killed. If we can say shot down, as we are now in a position to, instead of crashed, then we've answered a how question. By no means not the only how question, but certainly a crucial part of it. And then we use the next paragraph in a news story to fill in some of the more basic details. And we now know, as we knew at the time, that the aeroplane was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, that it was on a standard flight path between Europe and Asia, and that, that information tells us that there was nothing bizarre about the flight. It was not off course. It was not doing anything strange. It was following an established flight path. And then after that we can add less urgent information. We can find out, we can tell our readers where the passengers came from, we can talk about the reaction from people in power. We know that the the government of the Netherlands and the government of Australia where, which were the two countries where most of the passengers came from had a lot to say about this crash and who was responsible for it. This became, in the end, a big story in its own right. But on the day of the crash, that's much less urgent information than the basic stuff about the crash itself. Here's another intro, closer to, our lives in the community of Newstown. Goanna Developments say they'll build a $300 million shopping centre in the centre of Newstown, if the local council will give them the land. That's a what, and a where, and a who. And we don't say a when there, but we do have the information that there's a condition that the local council have to give them the land. And here's another straightforward intro. There arson squad's investigating the cause of a fire that destroyed a warehouse in Packer Street, Newstown last night. Straightaway, as soon as we see the words arson squad, we know, aha, this is a fire that has probably got a criminal source. And so, we now know that it was a warehouse, that it was destroyed, we know where it was, and we know when it occurred. So you can see how, if you're very sparing with your language, you can answer those five W questions, very succinctly, but it takes a lot of practice. The next thing is to think about the order in which you're going to present the rest of the information. And a way to tackle this sometimes difficult question is to say, well, what would I want to know next? What's the most pressing information that I need to know? And put it in. And then sometimes you get stories which have had quite a number of themes, all related to one another. But if you jumble them up, it becomes quite a difficult matter to read the copy. Now here's a story where we've got an airline putting up its fares because the fuel price has gone up. And the putting up of the fares has caused the airline's share price to go up too because, obviously, investors think that they'll make more profit. So we've got the story with these three aspects, the passenger fares, the fuel costs, and the share price. Which one are we going to use first? Well, think of your audience. Assume that's the general public. And for the general public, of course, the most important thing is the cost of air fares. So, of those three themes, news values would tell us to choose the airfares theme first. So we have an intro segment, Qantas increasing all its domestic airfares by up to $10 to partially offset the rising cost of fuel. And then we've got other aspects of the of the ticketing part of the story. So we can talk about the cost of flights between Australia and New Zealand, we can say when they'll take effect and we can say that this is the fourth increase in two months. And that deals with the ticketing part of the story. And then we can go on to the fuel, which is the cause of the fare increase. We can say how much the fuel's risen by and what the level now is, and anything else that we might know about fuel. And finally then we've got the share price which, for a general audience, is probably least important because relatively few members of the public would have shares in Qantas. But it's a legitimate story for that part of the audience, and so we deal with that at the end. And if you had to cut that story, you would cut it from the bottom and do least damage to your audience's interests. And here's an example of thinking hard about who your audience is. A long time ago, when I was working for the Financial Times in London, I had to write a story about the crash of this American Airlines DC-10 at Chicago. An engine actually fell off the aircraft on takeoff. And I wrote that intro you see at the top of the slide. It's a standard news intro for a story like that. And of course it started off with the death toll. But it was sent back to me by the news editor of the Financial Times. He said, no, no, no. He said, think about your audience. We're interested in the economics. So I had to rewrite the intro in the way that you can see there in the second version beginning with the effect on the shares in McDonnell Douglas who are the aircraft manufacturers. And their shares fell 20% when the public heard that an airliner that they had built had crashed on takeoff. And the death toll, for the audience of the Financial Times, was merely incidental. So it's a good example of how we need to think about our audience when we're deciding what is the most important fact. So to summarise, decide who your audience is, put what, for them, is the biggest, newsiest, and most important fact at the top. And then organise the information that you've got by asking yourself, what would I want to know next? Or if you've got a whole set of themes, organise it thematically so you're not jumbling stuff up.
