4: Writing Straight News for Digital and Print Media
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- Understand essential news values
- Recognize the importance of news leads and learn to write straight news leads
- Learn to recognize and use essential straight news story structures
Large portions of this chapter are remixed, revised, and amended from Writing for Strategic Communication Industries, https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/stratcommwriting/
The purpose of news
While the structure of news stories and the ways people consume news have evolved rapidly in recent decades, the overall purpose remains the same. News informs and entertains readers and listeners. News stories give citizens information about events happening in their communities and around the world. News plays an essential role in shaping public opinion.
We can know something about what is happening in a foreign country without traveling there. We can develop an opinion about a public figure without meeting them. News gives us a general sense of what is happening in the world and what our place and our role in these events might be. This chapter covers types of news, news values, and how to write news stories using essential story structures.
Types of news
News comes in two basic types often called straight news and feature news. If you were to go to an online news site or read through your social media feed, it would be possible to classify all news as straight news or feature news, so it is important to thoroughly understand both terms.
Stories that report only the most essential information in a concise and impartial manner are referred to as “straight” news stories. Another term often used for these types of stories is "hard news," which suggests the serious nature of most topics covered in straight news.
You will notice that the definition suggests that the type of story and the way it is written go hand-in-hand. This is no mistake. Usually, straight news stories are written in a fact-focused, straightforward way. Writing straight news is different from most other forms of writing in that it cuts to the chase and offers little in the way of descriptive language. It is meant to convey the facts in a narrative form that is efficient and clear above all else.
A feature article often goes into more depth than a hard news article and uses storytelling devices and the inclusion of details that you might expect to find in short stories and novels. Feature stories are often considered “soft news” and do not focus solely on facts.
Feature stories differ from hard news in terms of topic and tone. Feature news writers typically have the flexibility to use a wider range of story structures. They often provide rich descriptions and include scene-setting anecdotes. Features are usually longer in terms of word count and page count than straight news stories, and features are almost always accompanied by photos, photo illustrations, graphics, including infographics, maps, and more.
Generally, hard news stories deliver “just the facts” as efficiently as possible, while feature news articles aim to provide readers with an immersive experience that infuses factual, timely stories with emotion and a sense of place and broader purpose.
Some examples of straight news topics include social issues, general politics, economics and local business news, crime, government and court proceedings, education, and technology. This is not to say that readers will never see feature stories that delve into these topics, but most straight news is about the latest developments in these core social, economic, and political fields.
Straight news story structures
The format of news stories should follow the intended function of the story. Since straight news articles are meant to cover core facts efficiently, most straight news stories follow the inverted pyramid structure, which organizes information in descending order of importance with the most newsworthy information placed atop the story in a summary news lead.
More details about the inverted pyramid story structure are shared in the third section of this chapter.
The next chapter delves more deeply into writing feature news.
Editorial pages
Although the standards of journalism ethics call for general newswriting to be objective in content and tone, news editors may communicate personal points of view about current events and topics. After all, news editors are usually some of the most knowledgeable people in a community about current events. The editorial is a type of article that delivers an argument or opinion backed up by facts. News editors historically have been quite influential in swaying readers’ opinions.
News editorials may be written by individual editors, by invited contributors, or they may represent the official view of an editorial board, that is, a group of editors at a newspaper who will deliberate before delivering some shared perspective on current events.
Historically, readers have questioned how news editors could be objective when overseeing news pages but opinionated in editorial pages. News editors have long taken pride in striving to set their personal points of view aside when covering news, but many also relish the chance to influence public opinion directly when they feel they have something to say.
Many media scholars, including some in this article, would say that objectivity in news reporting was more goal than practice and that scientific objectivity in news has never been truly attainable.
About "objectivity"
There is much more to newswriting than learning how to "be objective." Striving for impartiality in news was a way to bring multiple perspectives under one banner in regional media operations in the early 1900s where partisan newspapers had previously been the norm.
News organizations in the days leading up the Civil War in the United States, for example, were sometimes openly violent toward one another. Besides being bad for society, open violence between news outlets was bad for business. Setting an objectivity standard suited business interests and 1920's progressive interests who saw the application of science as the answer to society's major ills.
Today, many in the audience are critical of the business interests of corporate-owned newspapers while others are skeptical about how well science as a matter of practice can be applied to human behavior, which is influenced by so many factors. Impossible applications of science may be leading some to question all of science, which was never the intention of those who supported making newspapers more impartial or "objective" in the early 20th Century.
Claiming impartiality puts newswriters in a predicament where any hint of an opinion or refutation of an official source might lead to claims of bias, even when journalists are stating factually that they are being lied to. In subsequent sections, approaches for how to write stories with as much impartiality as possible are discussed, but so are other options for newswriters interested in demonstrating to mass audiences that they are being truthful.