2. Tips on journalistic writing at the S&B

2.1. Qualities of a good story

Information: a good story is based not on language but on content. The writer must gather specific, accurate pieces of information to include in the story; so basically, you must actually report, not just write.

Relevance: There should be a reason for your story. A story should pass along information, challenge readers' beliefs, or simply help them go about daily life. Part of the S&B's job is to find the significance among those things traditionally thought to be insignificant. See below for more on this.

Context: Readers need perspective to understand a story. You personally might have followed a particular student group's birth, life and demise, but many have not. You'll need to fill everyone in on the history in order for people to understand the present. See here to learn about placing context in a nut graf.

Focus: Ernie Pyle wrote, "If you want to tell the story of a war, tell the story of one soldier." A broad topic like "diversity" or "town/gown relations" will not make a good story. You need to find some piece of that to cover; a person or a group of people or an event to show the readers to represent the whole issue.

Journalists are writers, but writing is really only half their job. More difficult is the legwork of actually finding out what you're going to write about: the reporting. If you do a good job gathering information, your story will be easier to write and more interesting to read.

Preparation

Research: Find out some basic information both about the person you're interviewing and the topic you're interviewing the person about. Being at least semi-educated about the issue will help you establish a semblance of professionalism and will also help you prepare better questions. "Non-interview sources" on p. 8 for places to find this information.

Dress: This is entirely up to you. Just keep in mind that if we want to be taken seriously, we need to act like it sometimes. That means that if you're meeting with a trustee to discuss diversity on the faculty, you might want to dress up a tiny bit.

Location: This depends on what you're working on. If you're writing a basic news article and you simply need the facts from a busy administrator, just go to her office. On the other hand, if you're doing a profile on a student with an interesting hobby, you'll get better notes if you actually arrange to go somewhere with him and have him show you what he does.

Establish conditions: Tell the interviewee about how much of his or her time you think you'll need. Talk about recording if you think you'll be using it. Ask the interviewee for anything you should read to better prepare yourself for the interview. If you need to talk to someone off campus on the phone, talk to your editor: the S&B has a long-distance code, which is a lot easier to use than to try to get reimbursed later (though that's also an option).

Prepare questions: There are two basic kinds of questions you'll use in an interview-open-ended and closed-ended. Open-ended questions allow the interviewee to be flexible and non-specific in answering. They're the "whys" and "hows" and "explains." Keep in mind that vague questions invite vague answers. Closed-ended questions pin down details. You don't often get good quotes from closed-ended questions, but you need to use them to make sure you have the correct information. An often-used strategy is to alternate between closed-ended and open-ended questions, rephrasing each time in order to get the kind of answer you need. Looking slightly stupid to the interviewee is much preferred to being wrong in print and looking stupid to everyone.

Establish rapport: Think about the relationship you want to establish with the interviewee. Chances are he or she will be slightly uncomfortable being interviewed so it's often best to start off with some sort of non-threatening (read: boring) small talk. If the person is busy, however, this can backfire. It's often good to tell the person why you're talking to him or her; maybe somebody else you talked to said that this person would be an important and trustworthy source. Maybe it's important to get their perspective in order to get a balanced view of the topic. If you have a reason for talking to this person that might not be immediately apparent, get it out on the table.

Note-taking/taping: Note-taking often makes interviewee nervous, so be discreet. Learn or create a shorthand of some sort or at least learn how to write in your notebook without having to look. There's no real way to learn to take good notes except by doing it a lot. You might try just taking notes from NPR or a boring class: writing down quotes without looking at your page. It'll get easier. Don't be afraid to use "could you say that again" or "just a sec" or "could you tell me more about ______" as stalling mechanisms to buy yourself time to catch up when writing. These continuations will often provide you with the greatest information from the interview because they invite the subject to say it again or to continue in greater depth.

Confirm details: Even if you think you know how to spell everything and where it is and when and such, ask anyway. We don't want to be wrong. Get names spelled slowly, even easy ones (even Smith has been known to be Smythe, for example), and recheck basic facts.

Don't just listen for quotes: Use all your senses. You should have notes other than just what the person said in your notebook. What was the person doing? looking at? What expressions were on his face? What's the setting? Were there sounds in the background? Even touch and smell can be useful. If you need to take your reader to a setting, there's nothing like the smell of fresh cut grass or hot asphalt.

Follow-up questions: Don't be afraid to stray from your list of prepared questions. The interview should not proceed exactly as you expected, so follow it where it (and the interviewee) leads. Just make sure that you have covered everything you knew you needed to cover before you leave.

After you leave

Review your notes: If you tried not to look at your notebook while writing, it's probably a mess. As soon as you leave an interview, sit down, look at your notes and copy over what you think will be the important quotes. It's no fun to look at them the next day or whenever you want to write and find that you have no idea what any of it says.

Go back: Don't be afraid of returning to your source via phone, email or even another interview if you have some holes that need to be filled or a later source brings up some issue you didn't cover. Some profile writers, in fact, swear by follow-up interviews: it's often the only way to find the right facts to bring a broad-ranging story into a coherent narrative. And again, it's better to look dumb to your source than to the whole campus when the paper comes out later.

The interview is not the only tool available to journalists. Interviews can provide quotes and some information, but unless you have infinite time and patience to schmooze and track down professors all day long, you'll need more in-depth information for some stories. Also, interviews are not the best place to find specific facts and numbers, especially about broad (national or international) trends. You can get numbers from interviewees, but always ask for citations. It's a lot more credible to cite the Center for Disease Control than a biology professor.

Paper research can be invaluable in providing background information, as well as specific data to include in your finished story. Look in old issues of the S&B (in the publications building for recent years, in Burling Library back to the 1800s), other newspapers, magazines or journals. The internet can be useful as well, but as always, be careful what you believe. You should usually cite online sources rather than simply treating them as fact.

Simple observation can be useful too. If you're writing an in-depth story on a sports team or a play, ask if you can sit around on the sidelines or in the back row during practice. People will become comfortable with your presence, making interviews easier later; you'll have more to talk about in those interviews; and you'll see interactions between the players that you can use in your story. Dialogue is a good technique to steal from fiction.

These are the hardest parts of stories. They determine whether readers will commit to a story, and how readers feel when they put a story down.

Beginnings

The key to a lead-whether it's for reportage, feature, review or whatever-is identifying the news peg; that is, why are you writing the story in the first place? Why should readers care? And more than that, what parts of the story will the readers care about the most? Often there are side issues, or questions you'll eventually need to answer in order to keep readers from finding the story incomplete. Tackle these things later in the story.

When you first get the story, figure out what the story's news peg is (maybe with the help of the editor who assigned it to you), and keep it in the back of your mind all the time when you're gathering information. List the questions that readers might ask and make sure you answer them as you go along.

Sometimes the news peg will be very abstract, and the lead will follow in kind: "Grinnell students can expect to pay higher tuition next year" does very well as a first paragraph. But in feature, account, review and opinion stories-that is, everything but hard news-you should find a more creative way to present the news peg.

Most account and feature leads, therefore, turn to concrete: they select an anecdote that somehow illustrates a central idea in the story. Here's the beginning of a profile that focused on its subject's application of the student-at-Grinnell experience to the prof-at-Grinnell experience:

When asked about her experience going from being a student to a professor at Grinnell, Sarah Purcell '92, History, is disappointingly secure.
Any embarrassing first-day moments? No, the first day was surprisingly quiet, Purcell said.
Any big surprises? No, she said, life is pretty much as expected.

Reviews and opinion pieces can be harder to make concrete, but they should be no less engaging. Sometimes you can achieve this with an appealingly concise abstraction: "Credibility can bite my ass" was the first line of a CD review discussing Grinnell's natural deficiency of musical indie cred. Other times, you can turn to a surprising fact. A column exposing the source of ARH's desk-chairs began:

When an institution is an especially good client of a company, the institution is often recognized through discounts, partnerships, and even a branded line of merchandise. Grinnell College must be an excellent client of Iowa Prison Industries, because we got an entire suite of furniture named after us.

One final note about leads: honesty is more important in a lead than anywhere else. A whiff of artificiality in a lead is enough to contaminate an entire story. Often, writers are tempted to open a story with a sweeping generalization or a zealous endorsement. Such cheerleading only interferes with the story. There is no need to open a feature story about an upcoming dance concert by praising the dancers' skill; judgments aren't facts, and they don't make for interesting stories. Find the news peg, and let your readers make judgments for themselves when they attend the concert.

Endings

Fortunately, these aren't as hard as leads. The most important thing to remember is that, unlike academic papers, newspaper articles have conclusions without having summaries. Do all your summarizing in your lead and your nut graf. Instead, use the conclusion to bring a story into a circle-for example, by referring again to a character from your lead-or to open up a new perspective or synthesis. Often, a good quote can do the job: look especially for someone who has something relatively unexpected and insightful to say about the "big picture" of a story.

Nut grafs

A lead, whether it's abstract or concrete, can't do everything on its own. You need to describe the entire situation behind the news peg, including the lurking facts that people may not be talking about very often. Feature leads, in fact, usually avoid mentioning the news peg explicitly; feature writers draw readers in with their creativity and then let readers know why the story is interesting several paragraphs later.

All this work should be done by a nut graf. Nut grafs add context and background to a story, and usually set up a frame for the story to work within. A nut graf in a story about two major changes to the college's alcohol policy would mention them both and quickly explain any recent trends in alcohol consumption or policy changes.

Contrary to its name, a nut graf can be two or even three paragraphs long if it needs to be. A nut graf is usually very dry, so the sooner you can get it over with, the better. Still, the best nut grafs include vibrant verbs or metaphors that burn a structure for the story into the reader's consciousness. Once this is done, readers can easily stack all the information you're about to provide into the neat framework that you've built for them.

Inverted pyramids vs. hourglasses

The classic style of newswriting, with the 'most important' facts at the top, followed by less and less important facts in descending order is called the inverted pyramid. Inverted pyramid leads begin with who, what, when, where, why, and how, all in a few sentences. Then comes the nut graf, and so on.

This style was developed by the first national newspapers in the mid-19^th century, and at the time it was ideal. Because news from across the country was so hard to come by, newspapers were often the only source for hard facts, and readers could get those efficiently from inverted-pyramid leads. Moreover, when newspapers were laid out on printing presses, the process of arranging stories on the page was devilishly complicated, and inverted-pyramid style let editors chop off the bottom of the story-the narrow "point" of the pyramid-without having to worry about losing the most important facts.

As described above, however, the inverted pyramid has disadvantages. Its artificiality can seem distant and dispassionate, and the decreasing order of importance gives readers little motivation to read a story beyond the first few paragraphs, causing them to miss important complexities or powerful details. Arranging facts into order of importance, rather than chronological order, breaks up the narrative flow of a story and can make it more confusing. Finally, news analysts have increasingly realized that facts don't have objective 'importance'; that's a subjective, and therefore unreliable, value judgment.

All these problems are mitigated in first-rate inverted-pyramid stories: reportorial prose need not be boring, and putting the important facts up front is certainly convenient for the reader. The best reportage crackles sharply enough, without distracting from the subject matter, to give the reader a reason to read on, if only to enjoy the writer's skill. All the same, many of these problems are solved by a newer structure for news stories: the hourglass.

The name refers to a modified inverted pyramid; hourglass stories start with some important facts, move into minutiae for a while, and then set up an important conclusion at the end. But good hourglass stories aren't just inverted pyramids that have been rearranged: they advertise their nature with a more creative feature lead (see above) and move naturally from one area of inquiry to another before drawing the reader up to the conclusion. To do this, they often employ narrative techniques like chronology, dialogue, and characterization to drive the story forward.

The S&B sometimes runs inverted pyramid stories, for harder news pieces where the facts tend to speak for themselves, but most of our content is more hourglassy.

Transitions and subheads

Stories should flow intuitively from one area of inquiry to the next: after you present a given piece of information, anticipate the questions your reader will ask, and answer them in the next section. Use a sentence or two of your own prose to bridge one area of inquiry to another: "faculty members thought otherwise" or "meanwhile, the city council was debating the same issue."

Sometimes, especially with very long or complicated stories, you simply can't include everything without a sudden jolt at some point. That's all right. You or your editor can insert a subhead within the text of the article, signifying that a new topic will be brought up.

Always remember that a newspaper stops being useful when its audience stops finding it relevant. All articles, and all information in those articles, should be selected with an ear to what the S&B's readership will find interesting and applicable to their lives.

For writers, this becomes particularly challenging in leads: a lead, with its news peg, should almost always be the most interesting part of a story. If, for example, administrators have decided on a significant change to the college's diversity policy, the article should probably not begin with a description of the meeting at which the decision was made-even if the administrators you talked to described that meeting in great detail.

Instead, start with a concise big-picture summary of what matters the most to students' lives: "Next month Grinnell College will officially declare its commitment to bringing students and faculty of all political stripes to its campus." Or maybe use a specific anecdote that illustrates why administrators decided the change was necessary: "Nancy Garbo '08 has received three separate threatening messages on her whiteboard in the two weeks since she posted a sticker above her door that opposed abortion rights."

On the flipside of this concern, articles should avoid sensationalizing or oversimplifying complicated issues, and should frequently expose readers to the unfamiliar. Oversimplified information can be worse than no information, because-especially on hot-button issues like race, sexuality, class, gender-readers often bring whole buckets of assumptions to the table. Writers should be aware of complexities inherent in their articles, and should take care not to gloss them over. Instead, talk to lots of people until you unearth unexpected aspects of an issue. This will keep your news fresh and your articles accurate.