How to Write a Basic News Story in 10 Steps
I remember trying to put together the first news story I ever wrote for a journalism class I was taking. To put it lightly, I felt lost and found myself wrangling with how to best arrange the piece.
However, with time I learned that while writing a simple news story may seem intimidating, the process is often quite straight-forward. That’s not to say it doesn’t take a very long time to learn how to write news stories well, but anyone can get started today by following these basic steps:
1. Select a style guide to follow
Most major news publications have style guides they publish which are guides for their contributors to follow. The reason these guides exist is to ensure that there is consistency in the works these organizations publish.
My preferred style guide, and one of the most popular in the United States, is the AP Stylebook published by the Associated Press. It outlines how to tackle certain grammatical situations and how to spell or use certain words.
2. Choose a focus for your story
Now that you’ve got your stylebook by your side and ready to reference (and believe me, you will need to reference it!) you need to pick what you’re going to write about.
The two main types of stories are hard news and soft news.
Hard news stories are timely and often must be published quickly lest they lose their relevancy. Some examples of hard news stories include press conferences, traffic accidents, releases of new reports or studies, etc.
Soft stories, often called “features”, are less urgent and don’t need to be published in the immediate future. Examples include profiles on specific individuals or organizations, human-interest stories, product reviews, etc.
What publication you’re writing your news story for will influence which direction you should choose.
3. Identify persons of interest to interview
Once you’ve gathered a good idea of what you want to focus your news story on, you need to brain storm a variety of individuals to interview. Choose carefully as the content of these interviews will be the engine that drives the rest of the process.
A simple way to figure out who to interview is to reach out to a number of people with different levels of authority, extents of involvement, and perspectives.
As an example, let’s say you’re covering a story on a traffic accident.
Some people that you might want to try to reach out to are:
- The drivers involved in the accident
- The first-responders to the scene
- Any impartial 3rd passer-bys who witnessed the incident
Additionally, gathering any documents such as an incident report from the police may be helpful.
4. Brainstorm questions and conduct interviews
Now that you’ve put together a list of people to talk to about, you’re ready to start brainstorming some questions you’d like to ask them.
You’re going to want to mix in a variety of questions that focus on their subjective opinions (ie: what did you see?, how did you feel as you witnessed the accident?, which driver do you feel was at fault and why?) and objective information (ie: where were you headed to?, what time did the incident take place?, can you describe the vehicles involved in the accident?).
Once you’ve got your questions all lined up, you can arrange to meet with your subjects and begin conducting interviews. A helpful tip for interviews is to embrace the 21st century and use your smartphone to record the interaction (with your subject’s consent).
5. Pull out important quotes
By this point, you should have a pretty good idea of which quotes will be important for the readers to see.
Make sure to use direct quotes for subjective information and paraphrase individuals for objective information.
6. Find your headline
Now that you have an idea of what your interview subjects have to say, a story should be taking shape. Analyze the facts and find a headline that makes sense for what readers should expect to see from your story.
A few pointers on headlines:
- The AP uses downstyle for headlines which calls for capitalizing the first word and any proper nouns in a headline while leaving the rest of it lowercase(ie: President Trump seeks re-election).
- They should contain action verbs
- They are written in the present tense
- A comma can be used to replace the words “and” and “but”
7. Layout the structure of your story
Now that you have your headline in place and your important quotes teed up, you’ll want to layout the structure of your story.
News stories follow the inverted pyramid method of storytelling. What is the inverted pyramid? While a traditional story may begin with “once upon a time, there was a princess” and end with “then the dragon died and the princess was saved”, the inverted pyramid begins with “dragon dies, princess is saved” and ends with “there was a princess”. Essentially you’ll want to cut to the outcome and most important details of the story as fast as possible and save the background details for the end.
A good way to get into the habit of figuring out how to prioritize information is to ask myself “okay, if the reader just read the first two paragraphs of this then stopped reading, what would I want them to take away”? This question is effective because often readers won’t be reading the story from beginning to end.
Now that you understand the inverted pyramid, use it to figure out what order to lay your quotes out in.
8. Write the lede
With the headline all set and the quotes positioned, you can now write the lede (also known as the lead). The lede is the first 1–3 sentences of a news story and is the most important part of what you’ll be writing. It should essentially sum up the most important information your story is meant to convey.
The lede is supposed to answer the 5 W’s of your story:
- Who?
- What?
- Where?
- When?
- Why?
As an example, let’s say we have the headline “Maxwell County faces historical blackout” the lede could be “Residents across Maxwell County suffered the largest blackout in decades Jan. 18 in due to what officials describe as ‘a freak accident’.”
9. Fill in the blanks
Now that you’ve got the lede down, you headline locked in, and you quotes sprinkled in the order you want them presented, you just need to fill in the details. This is the easiest part as most of the work is done by now. All that’s needed is some background information and connective tissue to bring it all together.
10. Edit, edit, edit
Hopefully you’ll be submitting this to an editor to double-check after, but regardless, you should edit it again and again before doing so. Read it out loud, as it often helps to catch grammatical errors. Go for a walk. Read it again. Keep doing this until you’re positive that it’s free of any errors. It won’t be, your editor will find many things that need to be fixed. But, it’s a start.
That’s It!
Just follow those ten steps and you should have a news story ready to go in no time!
Just to be clear, there’s a lot of ways to do write a news story, this is just one simple way. This is a quick overview of the process, and there’s lots of ways to deep-dive into the nuances of lede-writing, coming up with headlines, and conducting interviews, but this should be enough to give you a jump start.
Thanks for reading and happy writing!
