THE CITIZEN JOURNALISM MANUAL…

14. Types of stories and writing

Russ Grayson

Published in

PacificEdge

24 min readJul 30, 2022

There is a considerble literarure around the different forms of journalism we might employ in our work.

IN OUR WORK as citizen journalists we make use of a variety of story formats to engage with our readers’ imagination and offer variety on our website.
Some citizen journalists will adopt a particular story format and stick to it. It might be a straightforward news writing style suited to the subject matter and tone of their blog. Others might go for humour, instruction or satire. A blog commenting on politics or technology, for example, might stick to the formal style of reporting and analysis commonly used in the genre. This will give the blog a particular tone that readers may describe as serious and insightful.

There is one rule that applies no matter the style or tone of our blog: the writing does not get in the way of the story. What does this mean? It means that the writing does not draw attention to itself through the use of flowery or ornate language (‘purple prose’ in journalistic jargon) or through the use of complicated or over-technical wording. It has been said that the best writing goes unnoticed.

Let’s look at some of the different types of stories we might use in our blog. We should regard them as having fuzzy edges because some of the genres blend one into another.

News stories

The concept of ‘news’ as it apples in journalism describes reporting something that is new to a target audience or is an update or further development of something previously reported. It can be a development would be of interest to a specialist readership and is unlikely to be known to them.

Media organisations will have their own style manuals describing how news is reported as well as spelling and other grammatical conventions they use to give their reporting consistency.

The journalistic questions: Five W’s and an H

News stories are traditionally written in the concise, inverted pyramid newswriting format (see later). The style was adopted by newspapers because they had to squeeze news copy in between advertisements and had limited space in a column on a page. It is also useful where readers do not have time to read a complete story because they can get the gist of what happened by skimming the first few paragraphs. The format is straight-to-the-point, getting the main points across in the first few paragraphs in descending order of importance. It answers the journalistic questions of what, who, when, where, why and how — the five Ws and an H.

There is no need to adopt this style providing a story answers the five journalistic questions. They can be integrated into the text of longer stories as the story is related.

Newswriting also includes reporting new developments in news already reported. This is common where an event has first been reported as breaking news and where there is information still unknown because the event is still in progress. Reporting further developments takes the form of updates. Some news organisations use Twitter to post developing news updates from reporters in the field. Others use a blog format featuring updated information as it comes in and trough which readers follow the unfolding story. These are useful formats because breaking news leaves important questions unanswered during its early phase and because erroneous information can be reported. This is corrected in later updates and more reliable information comes to light.

Feature stories

These are longer stories that explore a topic in detail. Sometimes called ‘longreads’ because they take time to read, they can be analytical or follow the development of some idea or event. In a print magazine they will span several pages.

The stories may use creative-non-fiction writing techniques for reporting factual stories. From fiction writing they borrow plot, character description, detailed description of people/places/ideas, emotion, internal thought and direct quoted speech. They may be formatted chronologically or as a series of sub-stories around particular ideas leading to some conclusion.

Creative non-fiction might use the Freytag’s Pyramid story arc of introduction > rising tension as challenges are faced > resolution, the peak of tension which forms the peak of the story arc > wind-down where loose ends are tied together, lessons learned, how people were changed by their experience and where the people involved move into the future. This is a legacy of the New Journalism of the 1970s.

Creative nonfiction

Creative Nonﬁction magazine deﬁnes the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as “true stories well told.” We can think of it as writing that adopts literary styles and techniques of storytelling to craft to factual narratives.

Lee Gutkind, who started Creative Nonfiction magazine, describes the purpose of creative nonfiction as communicating information like a journalist so that it reads like fiction. The genre was earlier known as literary journalism and emerged in the New Journalism of the 1970s when it started to disrupt the conventional approach to news journalism and feature writing with its subjective perspective of writers who immersed themselves in the story, included detailed imagery of people and places and made the use of literary devices, like characterisation and plot (a fiction writing device that sets the course a story follows), techniques more familiar in fiction writing. Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Telese, Norman Mailer and Hunter S Thompson are some the genre’s noted early exponents who produced books as well as short stories.

The literary journalism approach offered an alternative to the conventional, terse, short and author-disembodied news writing style. It was related to another form of journalism that developed at the time that was known as investigative journalism. It examined topics in a more forensic manner, reporting motivations, character, methods, the backgrounds of those involved and sought information from multiple sources for corroboration. Investigative journalism followed paper trails to see where they led. It revealed corruption and shonky people. As it was put at the time: ‘shake the tree and see what falls out’.

Some of the non-newswriting forms we look at below fit the creative nonfiction genre. Memoir, the different narrative forms and the short story format neatly nestle in the creative nonfiction basket.

Opinion

Give your informed opinion on something. What do you think of it? Is it helpful or not? Does it do what it says it should do? Is it easy to use? Will the idea work? Analyse, suggest how well something works and, if criticising, say how it could be improved.

Opinion is a form of commentary providing a personal point of view based on an extensive knowledge of a topic. Although opinion pieces may be like reviews, reviews are usually less personal in their content.

Opinion is best when it can be shown that it comes from a reasoned analysis rather than some bias the writer has. In giving opinion beware of cherry picking facts to support your opinion and disregarding contrary evidence. This risks confirmation bias, reporting only those facts that support what you already believe.

Narratives of experience

These are stories of events, incidents, travel and so on experienced by the writer or by others.

The stories will not adopt the converntional news writing style. They will more likely take the form of a longer piece, include subjective observation and feelings, be written in the first person (the writer is identifiable in the story through the use of ‘I’ where they were present and writing of their personal experience), report the writer’s interpretations of the topic or event and in some cases borrow the Freytag’s Pyramid structure from fiction writing. Freytag’s Pyramid gives what would otherwise be a straightforward report a sense of dynamic movement. It could be employed in the creative nonfiction format of storytelling (see later in this chapter). The writer might offer advice.

Descriptive narrative stories

Descriptive narrative stories are a type of feature story, case studies focused on the analysis of something. They are different to narratives of experience because they do not focus on the personal experience of the writer or other participants, nor do they borrow from fiction writing structures.

They answer questions like:

why was it built? to solve what problem or take advantage of which opportunity?
who did it?
what obstacles were encountered and how were they solved?
what opportunities were encountered and how were they taken advantage of?
what would be done differently next time?
what lessons were learned?
what advice to others thinking of doing the same thing or something similar?

The purpose of descriptive narrative stories is to report factual information that makes sense of something and that carries lessons for future occurrences.

Reviews

Reviews are opinion pieces about a media product like a book, an article, video or film or about a technology or piece of equipment. They are critiques that comment on literary or production values or on the quality or usability of equipment. Reviews are analyses that can be critical or supportive. They carry an element of subjectivity because they involve a personal point of view.

As citizen journalists we ensure our reviews are factual and offer evidence for what we say because they can be influential in whether people buy a product of read a book. If we are reviewing a new hiking pack, for instance, and we find it inadequate for the task it was designed for, we have to say more than just that we found it inadequate and leave it at that. We have to go into detail about why we found it to be so. Was it too small? Too large? Poorly sewn and assembled? The fabric too weak? Was it too heavy compared to similar products? Equipment reviews entail technical detail. It is simlar with reviewing a book or film. What kind of readership was it written for and does it address their interests? What is the language like? What about the structure of the chapters and the adequacy of information? If it is a nonfiction work, does it quote authoritative sources and how accurate is the

Reviews can comment on how well or otherwise a product achieves what it sets out to do — its effectiveness. The purpose is to explain how well, or not, tools, technologies or equipment works. Rather than trash a faulty product, a more constructive approach is to write in terms of how it could be improved.

When reviewing tech, reviews are more authoritative when the writer is familiar with the application of the product or tech. For example, if reviewing hiking packs or equipment, it really helps where the reviewer is an experienced hiker and has an understanding of the materials used in manufacturing equipment and the ergonomics of using packs.

Comparison stories

These are reviews of two or more products to determine which does what better, which is best for a particular application, which is best value for money.

We need to develop a set of criteria by which to compare things. For example, in comparing cameras, reviewers use features that all cameras share like sensor size, autofocus points and speed, shutter speed range, interchangeable lens range and other technical details so readers have an objective basis for comparison.

Expository stories

‘Expository’ means to expose. Expository stories are written to provide information about something that may be hidden from public view or out in plain sight. Their purpose is to make public what might go on unseen, whether that is deliberately kept unseen of simply goes unnoticed. These are factual and analytical feature articles related to news writing and case studies.

Expository stories provide the reader with comprehensive information:

what do we know?
what were the motivations and influences?
what has been tried and did it work?
who was involved?
what costs were involved?
what problems came up and how were they solved?
is it fit for purpose?

Expository stories do not have to be about something that went wrong. An example of an expository story would be a case study about a building that describes its purpose, design, materials and other factors. The writer need not offer their opinion on the value or success of the structure, however where they do it is best to make clear that this is one person’s viewpoint and not not that of others. Expository stories can fit the investigative journalism genre.

List publications, videos etc and provide links to further information, reviews and original documents.

How-to stories

As step-by-step instructions on how to do something, readers/viewers come away with sufficient knowledge about how to do it themselves.

The steps involved are offered sequentially. List the tools, equipment and materials, including quantities and sources if they are not common materials. Video is a useful, explanatory medium for how-to stories as viewers can see something being done.

Guides

Guides are comprehensive instructional stories that take readers through a topic so that they gain a practical and comprehensive understanding of how something is done. They may include sequential, how-to content. Their purpose is to impart understanding of a topic.

A guide is more comprehensive than a how-to story. For example, whereas a how-to story on making a vegetable garden would take the reader step-by-numbered-step through a process, a guide to making vegetable gardens might include a history of the practice and a range of design-and-build options as well as some technical information about soils and botany.

Similarly, a getting-started guide might briefly explain the steps necessary to getting your new camera to work so you can quickly set it up and go outside and start using it. A camera guide book would explain different ways of using the camera, various setting options, the optical performance of different lenses, file formats and provide a comprehensive understanding of the camera and its capabilities.

A travel guide describes a place’s history, geography, information on how to get there, what to see and do, costs and precautions. It offer a range of activities as activities and options at the destination.

A guide is ‘about’ something rather than how to do it although it may include how-to information.

Case studies

Case studies are analytical stories exploring the detail of something. They may be realted to the expository story format. Readers or viewers go away with an understanding of why and how something was done, its design and functionality and lessons learned.

A case study of the classroom-on-the-commons at Randwick Community Centre in Sydney, for example, covered:

the reasons for starting the project
how it was funded
the architect’s design brief
how the architect approached the design in achieving energy and water efficiency as well as multifunctionality
how recycled building materials were sourced and used
how the building relates to the surrounding landscaping
observations and lessons coming from the use of the building.

Serialised stories

Rather than explore some topic in a longer story or ebook format, break it up into segments and publish weekly or at some other regular time intervals.

The format is useful to fiction writers and podcasters. When the fiction writing format of Freytag’s Pyramid is adopted (introduction > rising tension > climax > wind-down) it can be used to relate a nonfiction story as a serialised drama.

Link to previous segments and alert readers that another segment is coming.

Notifications

Post notification of events, courses, workshops, seminars etc on social media.

A fixed format consisting of:

name of the event
what it is about
who it would be most beneficial to (beginners, experienced etc)
who the presenters are (link to their websites if the event blurb does not include bios)
date
time
venue (link to an online map)
fee if any (say if it is free).

These are brief, informational postings.

Here’s an example:

EVENT: Organic Gardening course.
A seven-session course on Saturday afternoons designed for people who want to grow food in home and community gardens.
DATE: Starts September 14. Ends September 25. 1PM to 5.30PM.
VENUE: Classroom-on-the-Commons, Randwick Commuity Centre, 27 Munda Street, Randwick NSW. (link an online map showing the location).
FEE: Free.
BOOKINGS: Eastern Suburbs Community College (include detail).
EDUCATORS: Steve Batley, landscape architect and permaculture educator. Fiona Campbell, Randwick Council sustainability educator, permaculture educator (add links to educators’ websites).
WHAT TO BRING: Notebook and pen. Hat for sun protection. Enclosed shoes (not sandals). Warm clothing in case of cool weather.
NOTE: The course includes outside activity in the garden. Gardening gloves and suncream are supplied. A simple afternoon tea is supplied.

Portraits/interview stories

The portrait introduces a person to readers/viewers. It is essentially is an interview story written from material derived from the questions we ask.

Questions reveal something about the subject’s life, their work, motivation and influencers. Mix direct quotes with expository (explanatory) narrative to summarise and make links between topics. Interviewing the person is necessary, either in person on via phone or online. This is recommended over an email interview as it gets impromptu comments that can be revealing. A recorder app on your mobile device or a separate audio recorder can be useful and gives the option of including an edited sound file with the story. Make sure the person knows you are recording the interview.

Include a clear, head-and-shoulders photograph taken close to the subject. Alternatively, show them in their workplace in an environmental portrait — person plus the environment they work in. Ensure the person is prominent and recogniseable in the image and their face is well-lit.

Interviewees might be reluctant to discuss some aspect or event in their lives. Whether you try to get them to reveal some information is up to you and the purpose of your interview. You might press for details if the person is a public figure and knowing about their experience is in the public interest. The event might have been hurtful rather that their trying to cover up something, so try to discover why they are reluctant to talk about it and use that to make your judgement about following it up.

Biographies

Biographies are longer stories about people than portrait/interview stories.

The stories explore their motivations, challenges and life experience. Whereas the portrait might focus on a particular part of their life or a particular thing they have done, the biography ranges further over their life, perhaps as far back as childhood. It can include memories of family, people, places and events and might include intimate detail.

Again, interviewees might be reluctant to talk about some aspects of their life. Biographers often interview others who know the subject and this can reveal additional information to create a more-rounded impression.

Memoir

Memoir is personal history. It is about life, memory, recollections. It describes the experience of living through a period from the point of view of the writer. It is different to biography and autobiography because it spans a shorter period in life.

Memoir includes recollections for our own past. It might be about daily life in some past time or about some event. Memoir can include expository segments in the narrative to contextualise something experienced in the events of the time and may illustrate an individual’s response to those.

For example, a memoir I wrote spans my life from leaving high school to 1973. It contains flashbacks to earlier periods in life but does not dwell on them. I chose the end of high school because that was a transition time in life. I chose 1973 as the end point because that was another clear break with the years before. The years within that time span were an interesting time in society so I related my doings to the bigger picture of social change.

Memoir has value as the social history of lived experience. Include recollections of emotions and times good and bad. Memoir can also be used as therapeutic journal writing, such as when someone wants to clarify something in their past. This might be for personal use only or it may be later published.

In writing memoir there is a struggle between privacy and exposure. Do we identify people involved? Much will depend on what we are writing about.

We should know that others involved could recall incidents, people and time differently. That is what happened when an old friend and I started a shared-memory-writing exercise about a period in our lives that we went through. Her recollections of places and times sometimes differed. Occasionally, she remembered details or some incident that I had forgotten, and sometimes I recalled things she had forgotten. The result of our memoir writing experiment was a more-accurate and fuller story than would have been produced had only one of us written it. It brought a broader understanding of those years and our experience of them and in that sense was like shared, personal journal writing. The experience made clear how memory can retain or forget important detail.

Problem solving

Find a common problem people encounter and describe how we or others have overcome it. Include what didn’t work so that others do not have to discover that for themselves. Talk about what worked so they can try it.

Solutions journalism is a more-recent development that goes further than merely reporting something, to report how others are trying to solve a problem or to suggest potential solutions from the journalist themselves.

Social media is a useful source of learning about the problems people face. If there is a common question asked, it can form the basis for a problem solving article. Post the article on your website and distribute a description and the link to relevant social media sites.

Alternatively, crowdsource solutions by asking readers to describe how they solved similar problems. Gather these into an article.

Philosophical stories

These are stories about the big questions in life. They describe how the writer oran interviewee deals with these types of questions. Philosophical stories are to do with finding meaning and purpose in life.

They are also about how people think and act when faced with a dilemma. For example, a story might be about how someone made a choice when faced with a moral dilemma.

The stories might illustrate how someone applied philosophical concepts in a situation. It might be about how some life event led to someone adopting a philosophical outlook. For example, a person might lose their wealth and expensive home and be forced to minimise their possessions and live in a van. After living this way for a time they discover Stoic philosophy and, rather than rebuild their previous affluent life, they adopt voluntary simplicity and a life helping others set and reach their goals and deal with life’s dilemmas.

Polls

Conduct an opinion poll with yes/no or agree/disagree answers.

Allow comments in which respondents can contextualise their responses and offer suggestions. Report the results of the poll and any follow-up action. Offer analysis of any results if that would be useful.

Question posts

Ask readers a question such as how they solved some problem. Later, summarise the solutions and responses in a new post.

This type of story can help others solve some problem and can give them new ideas.

List posts

Make a list of related things, just their name and a brief paragraph on each. For example, a list of current courses, books or videos, a list of leguminous plants for food gardens. We might adopt a structure such as ‘the ten best books on permaculture design’, ‘the five best ways to silence know-it-alls’ or similar.

You can make a list post for social media of your published stories about some topic. Write an introductory paragraph explaining what the list is about and why you are posting it. Include links to the stories.

Link posts

Link posts connect readers to useful online resources by posting their URL links and a brief description of the resource, usually just a short paragraph or two. They are similar to list posts, however whereas list posts do not necessarily include URLs, link posts do.

The purpose is to make resources available. List a small number of linked resources per article.

In making link posts of useful resources, we become intermediaries between resources and those who would find them of value. This can provide a valuable service, saving people the time of searching for resources for themselves.

Call to action

The call to action makes something happen by recruiting people to act.

Structured, perhaps, on the Action Learning format of look > think > act, we supply the ‘look’ and ‘think’ components through analysis, then call upon readers to do something about it in the call to action ‘act’ phase.

For example, we might describe plans for a big coal mine on land presently used for farming, then talk about the value of farming over coal mining and its contribution to a warming global climate. We follow that up by calling on readers to do take easy-to-do, achievable action that contributes to keeping the land for farming.

Historical stories

There are narratives that explore he role of people, places, events, trends, buildings, ideas, tools and technologies in shaping the present.

Historical stories are valuable for creating an understanding of how something has developed and, in this sense, they can context the present in the actions of people in the past.

Literature research and interviewing people are approaches we can use. Historical articles are educational posts. Recorded as interviews with people who were present in a time and place and edited as an audio file for podcasting, they take the form of social history.

Food stories

This is not about photographing your meal at the cafe and posting it to Instagram with a comment of how good or terrible it was.
Food stories do benefit from photographs and the inclusion of recipes, however why not do something different to the average food writer and blog about the botany, the cultural history, processing and cooking, the kitchen tools traditionally used, the centres of diversity of the food plants used in a recipe? (where the plants originally came from).

Reporting humorous of tragic stories of our own experience and our misadventures in cooking can bring levity to a serious story.

Food stories can be anthropological when we include the role of food and its preparation in different cultures.

A quiz

Less structured than a competition, quizzes are informal and prizeless and have a fixed duration after which we identify the correct answer and those discovering it.

Make it educational by quizzing readers about something relevant to their interests. Make it neither easy and obvious nor too difficult, and encourage a little research.

The quiz is formatted in a lighthearted way that makes it fun. Post on relevant social media. For example, publish a photo of some unusual fruit on social media focused on gardening, and asking for identification.

Photo essays

A photo essay is a series of related photos that, together with a minimum of text, tell a story. They may explore a topic, a place or event or be structured as a how-to article.

Photo essays traditionally tell a story through the photos and the captions applied to them to explain what is happening and give meaning and continuity.

They have been important to recording history as it unfolded, such as the photojournalism in the print magazine, Life, during the war in Vietnam.

Single photo stories

A single photo illustrating or representative of something, accompanied by a brief informative text, can have educational and informational uses.

The photo needs to be clear and illustrative. It might be a close-up portrait of a person accompanied by a few paragraphs about something they did. It might be an environmental portrait showing someone in the environment related to the story theme, a cabinetmaker in their workshop, a gardening in their garden, a cook in their kitchen. It is important that the person appear prominently enough and in sufficient detail, and their surroundings showing some of the tools or other things they work with.

Here’s an example…

Michele and Dario Franzinelli check-out a flowering avocado tree in their Perth home garden.

The couple developed their typical suburban home garden into an urban minifarm growing a wide range of vegetables, fruit and culinary herbs. A small flock of chickens adds eggs to their home-grown diet. They process excess garden produce by preserving and drying to use later in cooking.

“It’s a bit of an edible oasis in the suburbs,” said Michele. “What we get varies with the seasons, but there is always something to eat. The garden shows the productive potential of the average suburban block when edible plants are established rather than giving the garden over to unproductive lawn and ornamental plants.”

The Perth home has become a popular venue for visits by garden clubs and permaculture groups.

Short stories

The line where the feature article ends and the short, factual story begins is blurry.

Where does one become the other? It could be how they are positioned in nonfiction writing rather than any firm, objective delineation that defines them. A feature article might become a short story when included in a book of short stories or when it appears on a website that publishes short stories. Nonetheless, the short story is an effective means of telling a story.

What makes a short story what it claims to be? Again, this is blurry territory because there is no firm definition of what makes a short story. Opinion suggests a short story is a piece on a subject ranging between 1000 and 15,000 words. That is a fair stretch of literary territory.

The short story is a common fictional form, however we are discussing it as nonfiction writing. We can use a range of literary approaches including the fiction writers’ Freytag’s Pyramid model that we have already mentioned or the feature article structure that lacks the Pyramid’s rising tension and resolution.

Jeff McElroy’s Californios is one example of the nonfiction short story genre. It blends journalism and memoir through its stories about life in a southern California surfing town, ranging through observations of characters and places loosely assembled around local lives and surfing. What holds it together as a book is its focus on a particluar place and the people that inhabit it.

I would recommend the short stories of book author, Joan Didion if you would like to explore the short story genre further.

Mixing fact and fiction

Another form for those with a flair for fiction writing is to present factual material in a fictional context.

Fiction with a basis in present-day science and political and social trends allows us to explore future possibilities and think about solutions, as does the speculative fiction writing of Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow and Australian cli-fi (climate change fiction) writer, Linda Woodrow. Speculative fiction allows us to explore actual trends and developments in society by taking them into an imagined future where they play out through imagined characters.

Speculative fiction can lift us out of our usual patterns of thinking and analysis and offer an engaging way to discuss possibilities.

It is important to label your story as fictional.

History-based fiction

History-based fiction takes documented history as its basis and weaves the story of different protagonists onto it. We might think of it as fact overlaid with a fictional story.

Let me use the writing of a friend as an example. She participated in the social upheaval of the late 1960s-early 1970s, in the movement against US and Australian involvement in the war in Vietnam and in the birth of the feminist movement in Australia. Although she had some experience in journalism, she chose to write about those times in fictional form.

She did this by basing her (unpublished) book on the documented history of the time combined with her personal recollections of participating in it. She overlaid with the doings of her fictional characters on the actuality of those years. Thus, history and memoir form the basis of her book and the lives of her fictional characters are played out atop this but remain within the ambit of the history.

Her characters are based on real people. Sometimes, she amalgamated a couple characters into a single fictional character. Fictional names replaced real names. Actual timelines of events were sometimes concatenated to keep the action flowing. The result is a fictional tale of fictional people, though some based on actual characters overlaid atop historical events. It is a lively way of telling a story and forefronts the ambiance and feeling of the time and places she writes of.

The potential here is in creating characters, including amalgamated characters, in which people might recognise themselves. This might not be a problem, or, perhaps, it could be if someone has bad memories of the events.
The author could have produced a memoir documenting her experiences of the time or written a straight historic documentation, however the result is a book that reads as a novel but is based in the real-life events of a period in Australian history. The historic part is true. The characters and their lives are fiction, or sometimes they are partially-true and amalgamated into single characters engaging in sometimes fictional relationships and interactions.
Productions like this are either books or longform articles. Their value lays in portraying how individuals experienced a period in history.

The fiction writer, Jack Keroucac, took a similar approach. The exploits he wrote of were actual. The characters were closely based on the people he associated with, their names changed.

I used the format in a short story about archeologists uncovering an old document supposedly produced 40 years before their time. The purpose of the story was to inform people engaged in practices that the document came out of that it had existed and been in circulation. The document was authentic although long out of print and known only to a relatively small number of people. The venue where the archeological excavation takes place was also authentic. The people and the excavation were not.

Once again, it is important to label your story as fictional.