How To Write The News

Put the most important information first.

Nov 15, 2021

So you’ve read some news and it’s time to write your own. Now what?

The main principle to remember is that the goal is to save somebody else’s time. Verifying information and analysing its consequences is time-consuming and laborious. Lots of people write professionally. Your job is to be more concise, engaging, and better-informed.

Furthermore, you are competing in the attention economy. Candy Crush Saga, TikTok and Netflix are a click away. You do not have very long to hook a reader and make your case.1

The second principle is to make the story as simple as possible, but no simpler. Do not patronise, under-explain, over-explain or attempt to affirm the jargon of others to telegraph your own brilliance to the news gods.2

Third, the story has to be interesting for you as the writer too. If you are not enjoying writing, I guarantee you that your reader will not either. One of the most underappreciated parts of the job is that you need to pay attention to your emotions while writing.3

Before You Do Anything, Get an Editor

Editors will stop you from making mistakes. Do this as early as possible. Ideally, you’ll find someone who knows the subject matter better than you do and is more careful than you, but not noticeably so. Figure out how they prefer to communicate and go out of your way to make their life easier.

You’ll know you have a good editor if your story comes back in better shape than when you filed it.

They may ask you to send a pitch that outlines your article even before you start writing. This is a good habit and saves a lot of headaches later.

A pitch might go something like this:

This is a post about how to write a news story. It will run through the steps you should take: Find a good editor. Match your style of communication to the needs of your audience. Get the basic outline right. Choose visual elements early on. Rewrite the story to make it better. Think carefully about word choice. Try to start early rather than procrastinate. Consider what writing tools to use. Stay calm as your deadline approaches.

Disconnect Your Ego

You need to write in a way that satisfies two conditions:

1. It must be simple enough that your dog could understand it.

2. It must be precise enough that an expert in the subject could read it and grunt along in resigned agreement.

You must assume that your readers know nothing about what you are writing about. Simultaneously, you must also assume that they are many, many times smarter than you and will instantly notice any errors of fact, judgment, or context that you have included - and any important elements you have failed to include. Because they can and do. Your readers are much smarter than you, and never forget that.

This is hard to do - and becomes harder if you are covering an industry or field that has a specific terminology, which is really all of them. You learn this quickly covering a beat. What's more informative: “Non-performing loans” or “bad debts”? “Market sentiment” or “investor confidence”? “Convolutional neural network” or “artificial intelligence”? The more you understand your subject area, the easier it is to explain these correctly to a general reader — and understand what the differences in terminology reveal or hide.

You cannot do this if you are worried about what other people think of you.

🎶 Musical Interlude 🎶

Get the Basic Outline Right

Write your lede paragraph first.4 It’ll organise your thoughts for the rest of the story. Use the active voice, rather than the passive: It’s “man bites dog,” not “dog was bitten by man.”

The first time you write the story is for your own understanding. Don’t send this version to your editor. Rewrite it first - and then file it.

During the rewrite process you might also wish to include a "to be sure" paragraph, which grudgingly acknowledges that there are alternative views to the central one that you are espousing. This helps quiet the voice in your head telling you that you know nothing about what you are covering.

To be sure, this is not essential in every story. If your counterargument is stronger than the initial one, you might have to rewrite the whole thing. You can do this a maximum of once per story before your editor smells a rat.

As we often explain to exasperated sources or press officers, most journalists don’t write their own headlines.5 However, it’s not professional malpractice to suggest some options to your editors before they have a crack at writing the only part of your story that’s guaranteed to be read.

Think About Visual Elements

Graphics, images, and video are important to break up the page. A lot of readers will not bother to read past the fourth paragraph, but they might skim through the story. Better if it’s not just a wall of text.

When You Rewrite the Story, Make It Better

Try to find synonyms.6 It's easy to get hung up on word echo, but it is unpleasant. The unpleasant thing about word echo is that even if you have read that word echo is unpleasant to read, and you try to read without finding the word echo unpleasant, word echo will still be unpleasant to read. Do you see?

It’s better to find a way to explain a concept simply than repeat the same phrase over and over.

Generally speaking, it's also best to limit the number of digits in a paragraph to one. People hate numbers.7

Do not neglect house style just because it's tedious. You will avoid irritating your editors by knowing the house style inside and out. Get familiar with the AP Stylebook if you work for an American publication. If you work for a British one, just try to do your best.

Save your best puns for chart headlines. Judge remorselessly any editor who nixes a good one. But make sure the explainer text is informative.

“But I’m a Writer”

Awww! Of course you are, petal. And it’s important not to neglect reading the works of others. In an earlier post I linked to all the world’s news sites; follow that up by reading every book published.8

In terms of honing your own craft, some good resources are Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, Matt Winkler’s The Bloomberg Way, Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, and Stephen King’s On Writing.

Read widely and with empathy, but do also remember that many readers will not care in the slightest for your lovingly crafted prose. Know also that beauty is truth, truth beauty. You’re doing this for morale. You like writing, don’t you?

As a practice, it’s still worth knowing the subtleties and tonal differences between a building that is “deserted”, “ruined”, or “dilapidated”. Are they synonyms?

A good idea I heard a long time ago was to bury a coin about two-thirds of the way into a story — an uncommon word to delight an attentive reader. I still like this.

For those who do make it to the end, you may wish to include an amusing quote or detail, also known as a kicker. Do not assume that it will get read, and avoid stressing over it.

Even less likely to get read is the material about three-quarters of the way through the piece. This is an excellent place to bury a coin.

How To Start Writing

Journalists are habitual procrastinators and, by and large, tend towards disorganisation. It’s nobody’s fault; it’s just a coping strategy for the mass of tasks being thrown at them from hour to hour as the news cycle swells and fades. But it’s worth having a strategy.

There are lots of books you can read about how to beat your own tendency to delay, particularly if you have something more important to be doing. Piers Steel’s The Procrastination Equation is great on this — I wish I’d read it sooner. Nick Winter’s The Motivation Hacker is a readable, albeit deranged, application of the same techniques.

If you really need to do something, there is no better way than to have a deadline. If you are not given a deadline, set your own and hold yourself accountable. Since this is a recipe for disaster, you can also ask your editor for a deadline. They will usually be more than happy to oblige.

If a deadline is approaching imminently, you will need to get into the right mood. Grab a big coffee, gulp it down, let the fear of your career evaporating course through your veins. Having drugged yourself into a state where your brain is telling you to reconsider all of the life choices that have led you here, it is time to write.

How To Type the News

Get the structure right, and you’ll find it easier to put words onto the page.

The following is the standard intro that gets typed at the start of every story I write:

LEDE
RATIFIER
QUOTE
CONTEXT

Filling in the blank paragraphs makes writing the story a lot easier. A “ratifier” paragraph is just a more detailed exposition of the facts you are describing more jazzily in the headline and lede — it “ratifies” the claim you make in the first sentence.

For anything longer than a four-paragraph story, first you’ll have to group your ideas together. This is best done with pencil and paper.

Type into whatever word processing software you like. I use Sublime Text, which is completely unsuited for the purpose, but it does have Regex search and macros.

I quite like turning off the monitor and typing into a black screen so that you can't edit as you go along. If you do this, make sure you don't set your keyboard to Chinese first, as you won't find out until your story is finished.9

Be sure to inform your editor about your progress along the way.

You can maintain relations with the desk by being cheerfully vague or evasive on critical questions that might lead to firings or a lawsuit, if you are so inclined. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.

Try Not To Panic

Before you file your draft, you must ensure that everything you have written is nailed down, laminated and covered in masking tape. It must be able to survive a hurricane. Even if you have an editor. Especially if you have an editor!

Once your story is filed, it can come out at any time. Someone on the other side of the world may publish it by accident. So don’t put anything wrong in it.

Always give the story a final stress-read. If you don't feel as if your entire nervous system has been replaced with bees, read it again and make sure every single fact is correct. Take deep breaths, calm yourself down and leave no stone unturned.10

Try to avoid being a perfectionist. Very little of what you write will matter next week, unless you get something very wrong. Just try to do your best with what limited knowledge you have in the little time that remains before your deadline. Good luck.

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