What makes a good story?

A good story is about something the audience decides is interesting or important. A great story often does both by using storytelling to make important news interesting.The public is exceptionally diverse. Though people may share certain characteristics or beliefs, they have an untold variety of concerns and interests.

So anything can be news. But not everything is newsworthy. Journalism is a process in which a reporter uses verification and storytelling to make a subject newsworthy.At its most basic level, news is a function of distribution -– news organizations (or members of the public) create stories to pass on a piece of information to readers, viewers, or listeners.

A good story, however, does more than inform or amplify. It adds value to the topic.

The Elements of Journalism,  in fact, describes journalism as “storytelling with a purpose.”Creating a good story means finding and verifying important or interesting information and then presenting it in a way that engages the audience. Good stories are part of what make journalism different, and more valuable, than other content in the media universe.

Research proves two things about good stories:

Treatment trumps topic. How a story is told is more important to the audience than its topic, what it is about. The best story is a well-told tale about something the reader feels is relevant or significant.The best stories are more complete and more comprehensive. They contain more verified information from more sources with more viewpoints and expertise. They exhibit more enterprise, more reportorial effort.Good stories are important and interesting

Writing coaches Roy Peter Clark and Chip Scanlan are quoted in the Elements of Journalism as believing that effective newswriting can be found at the intersection of civic clarity, the information citizens need to function, and literary grace, which is the reporter’s storytelling skill set.There are many things journalists fail to do to engage the audience:

Time is frozen

Character is missing

Stories lack meaning

Relevancy is assumed

Storytelling is predictable

Limited use of digital media to amplify storytelling

One of the keys to engagement is finding ways to fix these problems.

Unfreeze time

People are active, they are doing things – have your stories show that. Jack Hart, the former managing editor and writing coach at The Oregonian says 15-30 column inches is a reasonable length for a narrative that can be produced in a day. The idea is to follow a character through a complication and show how they resolve it. Think of a narrative arc: the complication is introduced, then the action unfolds, the character has a revelation, the character resolves the complication.Develop character

Too much journalism fails to develop character. The people are cardboard, names and faces fit into a journalistic template: the investigating officer, the protester, the conservative Republican, the liberal Democrat. Often, just a little more reporting can provide the kinds of details that avoid stereotypes and provide an interesting dimension to the people who inhabit your stories.

Tell the audience what it means

This is more than just decoding the latest zoning issues or the tuition increases. Tell your audience why the world works the way it does, why a certain trend is happening, why an event is or isn’t taking place. Don’t shy away from being an authenticator that provides clarity.

Prove relevancy

Readers view the news through the lens of their lives and filter the content based on their interests and concerns. Though journalists may think, in fact may know, that something is “news,” declaring it so doesn’t make it true to the news consumer. Relevancy should not be assumed. We need to prove it.

For example, how do you make local connections to the Asian economic market?The Portland Oregonian did it by following an Oregon potato from harvest until it was sold as part of a large order of French fries in a McDonalds in Singapore.Data is also effective. As an isolated incident, a smash and grab from a parked car probably won’t rise to the level of “news,” except to neighbors on the same street. But if crime-against-property statistics reveal a rash of “larcenies from an auto,” the “incident” becomes representative of something that’s happening in many neighborhoods, and as such, is news.

Experiment with storytelling

This is more than just dropping the journalist’s favorite crutch, the inverted pyramid and telling stories. This is about thinking of stories differently. Maybe a graphic or map is enough to tell the story. Maybe a photo will do the trick. Maybe the characters themselves can write, or speak, in their own words.

Use the Web

Use the Web to enhance the power of storytelling and make the story more personal and interactive. Video and audio make the reader an eyewitness. Comments, forums, and other crowdsourcing feedback allow citizens to interact with the news. Maps help readers see

where an event occurred and also their proximity to it. And a calculator allows users to translate big, abstract, numbers to his or her very personal situation.

Boring versus engaging stories – what’s the difference?

One way to view a boring story is as an issue of excess. Too long, too rambling, too “into the weeds.”

The problem with this approach is what it implies, that merely cutting down and tightening up a tale will fix it. Often, however, the central weakness of boring stories is not length but the absence of elements common to good storytelling.

This may reflect the reporter’s reluctance to make conscious decisions about the most important elements in the story – the central point, central evidence, central characters, and the central place.

Good stories prove their relevance to the audience

People care most about things that affect them.

On one level, the relevance of a story can be a function of geography. The reader is more interested in his local weather forecast than the national outlook. He is more interested in knowing why a police officer is taking a report on his block than somewhere else in the city.

A different kind of proximity involves emotions or interests. The reader may identify with a range of life experiences, from the emotional shock of losing a job or worrying about a sick child to mundane tasks like the weekly trip to the grocery store or filling the car with gas. Readers also identify with their own special interests, whether a hobby or sport or an important pocketbook issue like taxes, interest rates, school quality, crime and safety, health care, or economic development.

Good stories don’t just assume relevancy; they prove it. They make the case that, “you should take the time to read this story because it’s potentially important to you personally or to your community.”

Often this is done by illustration or comparison. The reporter might assume, for example, that the reader will be among a large segment of the audience comprised of stakeholders in a story – “taxpayers,” “consumers,” or “parents.” The weakness of this approach is one of degree. While it may lay the foundation of relevance, treating the reader as a member of a large group or class may not be enough to demonstrate that the issue or event is personally relevant.The anecdote, however, helps bridge that gap by offering more detail –specific facts, opinions, or experiences the reader can compare to his own knowledge and beliefs. The anecdote might focus on a person, in a story about Obamacare perhaps someone previously without insurance who is signing up. Or the anecdote may focus on a situation, perhaps observing the person trying to sign up for healthcare navigate a government website.

The strength of the anecdote is in the detail. The reader gets a set of specific facts or thoughts with which to compare or contrast his own experiences. If a connection occurs, the story becomes relevant on an emotional, as well as intellectual, level. Good stories don’t just “ring true,” they’re also engaging and compelling.

Using data is another way to prove relevancy. In a story about the impact of recession, the proprietor of a candy shop in Tampa, Fla., can accurately be described as a “small business owner.”  This assumes, however, that the audience can understand the significance of small business in the economic life of the community.

An alternative is to use two statistics from the Census and describe the shop “as one of 15,000 Bay area business run by mom and pop that overall account for 10 percent of local business activity.”   The statistics establish the appropriateness of the example, the credibility of the owner as a source on local business activity, and telegraph to readers that the story involved a higher level of reportorial effort.

A reporter can also use maps, calculators, and other software to establish relevance. A “big” topic like an approaching hurricane can be made more personally relevant by a map showing the chances of low-level flooding in a community or even neighborhood. Calculators allow readers can plug in their own data to determine how rising or falling interest rates might affect their auto loans or mortgages. And crime maps not only help people determine where incidents are occurring, but figure out how alert they should be.

Finally, for a story that is obviously relevant, data can serve as an exclamation point. When Target revealed that hackers had stolen the personal data of 70 million credit card holders, several journalists pointed out that one-third of the country’s 240 million adults were thus affected.

Good stories have strong central characters

Humans are the most interesting creatures on earth. Readers, in turn, are most interested in other people. It’s why the “head shot” – an image of a person’s face – has been and remains the most popular genre of news photograph.

“When interviewing someone, give them the opportunity to reveal something about themselves and their character.

”

Dr. Mario Garcia, CEO of Garcia Media and founder of the the graphics & design program at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, has 40 years of experience that includes redesigning The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.“Take a sample of a newspaper to a focus group, and it does not take a specialized eye-tracking computer to see how the eyes rest on and read the head shots,” Garcia writes. “They are quick encyclopedic references to who is in the story. Like headlines — and sometimes even more than so — head shots alert readers to the ‘what’ of the story as well.”One approach to developing a strong central character is to think about what kinds of information can make a “head shot” – a character in a story – come alive.

A strong central character is more than an anecdote. Getting a quote and placing it in a story like a piece of furniture provides words but little “voice.”  Missing is the detail about character or circumstance a reader needs to compare and contrast, to connect, with the speaker. People are cardboard, names and faces fit into a journalistic template: the investigating officer, the anti-abortion protester, the conservative Republican, the liberal Democrat.

Often, just a little more reporting can capture the kind of detail that avoids stereotypes and provides interesting dimension to the people who inhabit stories.

Consider the difference between “the investigating officer” and “detective Jones, a third-generation police officer who recalls his father having a similar case that he never solved.”  Or between “pro-life protester” and “a pro-life mother of three adopted children.” Or the conservative Republican versus “a Republican who boasts that he has voted against every tax increase in his career.”

When interviewing someone, give them the opportunity to reveal something about themselves and their character:

Ask what they are doing. Then ask why they are doing it. Ask what they are feeling. Then ask why they feel that way. Ask what they think. Then ask why they believe what they do.

Quotes are mere words. Good stories, however, capture the meaning behind the words. That’s more likely to occur if the reader knows not just who’s speaking but something about the person’s background and character.

Good stories use detail

Stories built on important or interesting themes supported by small but revealing detail are more complete because they give the reader more to grab on to.

Observation is the key to finding detail.

“

It said something about the man, about the job, about the world. It was a telling detail that opened up a window into this man’s life.

”

Before he was a best-selling crime novelist, author Michael Connelly was a police reporter at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Los Angeles Times.

In his 2004 book, Crime Beat,Connelly describes spending a week observing a homicide squad and learning “the single most important thing I ever saw as a crime writer.”On the final day, as he sat in the squad supervisor’s office going over last-minute details before returning to the newspaper to write his story, Connelly observed the detective remove his glasses to rub his eyes.

“When he dropped the glasses on his desk,” writes Connelly, “I noticed that the earpiece had a deep groove cut into it. It was like spying a diamond in the sand, for I knew exactly how that groove had gotten there.” At murder scenes he’d seen the sergeant approach the victim’s body and take his glasses off, always hooking them in his mouth.

“I knew that when he hooked his glasses in his mouth, his teeth clenched so tightly on them that they cut into the hard plastic of the earpiece. It said something about the man, about the job, about the world. It was a telling detail that opened up a window into this man’s life. It said all that needed to be said about his dedication, motivation, and relationship to his job.”

Connelly says he instinctively knew that whether it was a crime story for a newspaper or a novel about a detective, “My life as a writer had to be about the pursuit of the telling detail.”

Using detail in a story is similar to presenting other facts. A good story is built not just on facts, but on “the right facts,” information that sheds light on “the truth about the facts.” Good stories reflect good choices or, as former news director and Poynter faculty member Scott Libin says, “selection rather than compression.”

Good stories connect to deeper themes

“The best stories reach us on some elemental level. They talk about a mother’s love for her children, a husband’s pride in his country … There’s something very important that’s always going on in a very simple way in good stories,” says NBC correspondent John Larson.

Look for the story of why things happen the way they do and then look for a way to tell that story.

Sometimes someone behind the scenes is more important than those in the public eye. Pulitzer Prize winning historian Robert Caro tells how a bureaucrat and urban planner, Robert Moses, essentially re-made New York City, though he never won an election. Caro’s The Powerbroker isn’t just a biography, it’s a story about how power works.“

Imagining an image that may be ordinary but representative, can help the journalist decide what the essence of the story is.

”

Thinking visually about an iconic image or a brief “picture in the mind” can also help.

In the aftermath of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, a Washington Post columnist declared that the bomber, Tim McVeigh, had, in effect, become the country’s most influential architect.

The proof was iconic and immediately recognizable to readers – the cement jersey barrier, thousands of which had been placed around government buildings across the country to deter truck bombs.

It’s not always easy to find an iconic image that represents the core of a story. But thinking visually, imagining an image that may be ordinary but representative, can help the journalist decide what the essence of the story is.

The iconic image can also help the journalist find ideas for stories. We see these images all the time in our daily lives but often don’t ask ourselves what they might mean. Construction cranes punctuating the skyline, commuters at a bus stop all reading their mobile devices, pieces of re-tread truck tires littering the side of a busy highway. What questions might these images raise?

Thinking visually is what photographers do all the time. Thinking like a photographer can help journalists focus on the core of a story as they navigate their way through the fog of detail collected in the reporting process.

Good stories explore tensions

Tension makes life, and the news, interesting.

Sometimes the tension is between characters, for example two candidates vying for a public office. Or tensions may arise over different points of view about an issue or event. A central character trying to decide what to think or do about something is an example of an internal tension. When the reader faces a similar choice – should I believe the politician, should the city council close that street, should I support a tax increase – reporting on a central character’s decision-making process can be both interesting and relevant.Journalists trying to cover tension often find themselves reporting on the extremes. This is not surprising because the loudest voices are easy to find, reduce complex issues to a few quote-worthy talking points, and provide an unequivocal voice; there is no doubt where they stand.

The bi-polar approach, however, may not be particularly interesting or relevant because it leaves out the vast middle ground, the place where most of the audience resides. The reporter cannot explore internal tensions because the characters on each side have already made up their minds. So instead of participating in a decision-making experience, the reader is a relegated to the role of spectator.

Stories that focus on the extremes often result in a master narrative of conflict. There are winners and losers, villains or victors, or score-keeping about money, power, or politics.

Yet many stories don’t play out within conflict frames. The public, in fact, is ambivalent about many issues. It’s not that people don’t care or have no opinion. Rather, citizens continually gather information, weigh various choices, develop theories they test in conversation with others, and may not make a final decision until they have to.

If a journalist can get a character to share this thinking process – which is often about trade-offs – or eavesdrop on characters as they discuss their feelings and beliefs, ambivalence becomes interesting and also relevant to readers weighing the same issues or concern.

The master narrative of tension is an alternative to the conflict frame. “In most public issues,” says social scientist Richard Harwood, “there’s a tension. There’s a tension in schools between excellence and opportunity. There’s a tension in communities between further growth to increase the tax base and protecting the quality of life. Not that they’re mutually exclusive. But there’s a tension there. And we often pitch it as one or the other but most people want to reach some balance.”

The challenge for journalists, says Harwood, is to understand the essence of a story in order to choose the most appropriate frame.

Good stories capture emotions

Emotion commands attention and creates a relevancy of shared feelings between a character and the reader.

Yet the balance between emotion and news is delicate and, according to professor and head of the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago Zizi Papacharissi, journalists have always struggled to manage their own emotions in the name of objectivity or finding appropriate ways to integrate sentiment into a story.

“

A good story offers detail the reader can use to make his or her own judgments and, perhaps, forge an emotional connection with a character.

”

“The most masterful journalists, in their most memorable reporting, attain this perfect balance between emotion and information, color and news, the affective and the cognitive. By contrast, the form of news reporting least memorable is frequently characterized by excessive emotion, and the misinformation that excess produces.”

Eli Sanders, a writer for The Stranger, a weekly alternative newspaper in Seattle, found that balance in The Bravest Woman in Seattle, a story based on courtroom testimony in which a 34-year old woman described the attack that took the life of her partner. It began this way:The prosecutor wanted to know about window coverings. He asked: Which windows in the house on South Rose Street, the house where you woke up to him standing over you with a knife that night—which windows had curtains that blocked out the rest of the world and which did not? She answered the prosecutor’s questions, pointing to a map of the small South Park home she used to share with her partner, Teresa Butz, a downtown Seattle property manager. When the two of them lived in this house, it was red, a bit run-down, much loved, filled with their lives together, typical of the neighborhood. Now it was a two-dimensional schematic, State’s Exhibit 2, set on an easel next to the witness stand. She narrated with a red laser pointer for the prosecutor and the jury: These windows had curtains that couldn’t be seen through. These windows had just a sheer fabric.

The story was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and you can read it here.You can read comments about the story from past Pulitzer feature writing winners as well as excerpts from the two other feature writing finalists here.When describing emotion, less is usually best. Hyperbole does not work. Don’t tell the reader how to feel or, except in rare instances, how you feel. “A shocking development…” says, in effect, that something should surprise or dismay. Maybe it will, but that’s up to the reader, not the reporter, to decide.

Rather than tell the reader how to feel or use the reporter’s feelings as a proxy for what the audience thinks, a good story offers detail the reader can use to make his or her own judgments and, perhaps, forge an emotional connection with a character.

Good stories provide context

What background would a newcomer who is affected by the story need to know so that they might care about it?

For example, on the issue of Medicare:

What is Medicare?

Where did the idea of Medicare come from?

What was life like before it?

Another virtue of asking “what does my audience need to know?” is that it can create new entry points into stories – such as asking, what background would a newcomer who is affected, or has a stake in the story, need to know so that they might care about it?

The news can often seem like something only for news junkies, spoken in a language that only the initiated understand, especially when wire copy is used as base material. What new entry points can be created for the reader to feel as though he has a stake in the story?

David Halberstam, a 1964 Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the war in Vietnam for the New York Times and best-selling author of The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be, and many other works of non-fiction, talked about the value of providing context in a conversation with Bill Kovach on Nov. 9, 1996.We can make all kinds of stories interesting if we work at it…like the great Jimmy Breslin story: The day that John Kennedy was killed…everyone covered the funeral. He went and found the man who dug Kennedy’s grave. Use your imagination, be creative.

Making stories important. A sense of context. And what a journalist has to do in order to get stories into the minds of the people. To show why this particular piece of information, why a profile, is important. Why these things amount to something and provide a way to understand the world that helps you – the context of the stories is often more important than the event itself.

One of the reasons Bill Clinton was so successful is he spent his time designing a context within which he could embed himself. And the journalist needs to figure out how to provide a context outside of entertainment that works.

When I was in the Congo in ‘61 and ‘62, I could get into the New York Times every day. It was a terrific ticket for me. And the reason was, not that the public was interested in a poor African country…but Africa at that moment was perceived to be a pawn up for grabs in the great international struggle between us and the Russians. The moment the Berlin Wall comes down, it became once again just a bunch of poor black people no longer of interest. It suddenly became tribal again, and we’re not interested in a tribal struggle.

You can be passionate about your story and control that passion—not let the passion control you. You can trust in the reader that if you do it right the reader’s interest and involvement will be generated.

Listen, there is a hunger for good information out there. The Best and the Brightest was a huge bestseller, much to the surprise of the author and the editor who published it, because it took all those people who had flashed on the television screen all those times, and finally said, “This is who they are. And this is how they affect you. And this is what they mean to you.”

Good stories surprise the reader

Surprise in a news story can take a couple of forms, information you didn’t know or something you didn’t expect.

Flipping through a newspaper and seeing an item you had no idea you’d want to read is an example of serendipity, a happy coincidence.

In a story, the surprise is planned and strategically placed.

Helen Pearson, chief features editor at Nature, says, “good science stories are no different to good stories about anything else – they’re just a great read.”Pearson especially likes leads that surprise.

I’ve opened stories with an unintelligible line of Jane Austen; 9,000 placentas stewing in buckets; an impotent mouse; a phone call from a -80C freezer. In some cases, the opening might be the moment in time where your story starts – for example, one of my stories opened with the arrival of a fax that told scientists they had found the gene responsible for cystic fibrosis. Often the opening involves a person. I love it when you’re reporting a story and something unscripted happens (eg the freezer calls) and you think: that’s my lead.

CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman is expert at building to and then springing surprises on the viewers of his stories.

In a story aired on The CBS Evening News and The Osgood File on CBS radio, Hartman offers up not one surprise, but several.VO (Voice over pictures) – Steve Hartman, CBS News Correspondent“Born to Chinese immigrants, 17-year-old Angela Zhang of Cupertino, California is a typical American teenager. She’s really into shoes and is just learning how to drive.”SOT (Sound on tape) – Angela Zhang“Every girl needs boots. (laughs)”VO – Steve Hartman“She’s really into shoes – and just learning how to drive.”“But there is one thing that separates Angela from every other student at Monta Vista High School – something she first shared with her chemistry teacher. It’s a research paper Angela wrote in her spare time – it’s a recipe for curing cancer.”

SOT – Kavita Gupta, Angela Zhang’s chemistry teacher – with Steve Hartman“(Hartman:) Cure for cancer?! (Gupta:) Cure for cancer – a high school student. So, it’s just so mind-boggling…”SOT – Angela Zhang“I just thought: ‘Why not?’ (laughs) I mean, what is there to lose? So…”VO – Steve Hartman“So, when she was a freshman, she started reading doctorate level papers on bio-engineering. By sophomore year, she’d talked her way into the lab at Stanford…”VO – Steve Hartman“Angela thought: What if you mixed cancer medicine with a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles that would then attach to cancer cells and show up on the MRI, so doctors could see where the tumors were?”“Then, she thought: what if you aimed an infrared light at the tumors to melt the polymer and release the medicine – killing the cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells completely unharmed.”

SOT – Angela Zhang, with Steve Hartman“(Zhang:) I think it was more of a ‘This is really cool, I want to see if it works’ type thing. (Hartman:) And when you found out it did? (Zhang:) That was pretty amazing.”VO – Steve Hartman“It’ll take years to know if it works in humans – but in mice, the tumors almost completely disappeared.”“Angela recently entered her project in the National Siemens Science Contest…”

“She got a check for 100,000 dollars – and promptly bought about a dozen more pairs of shoes.”

SOT – Angela Zhang“I got these shoes, ‘cuz they’re purple and I didn’t have purple yet.”VO – Steve Hartman“Easy to forget, she is still high school. It’s just her dreams that keep graduating.”SOT – Angela Zhang“I’m excited to learn just everything possible,” she said. “Everything in the sciences — biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, even computer science — to make new innovations possible.”VO – Steve Hartman“Pretty big flats to fill. How will she top her cancer discovery? We can’t wait.”Good stories empower the reader

The purpose of journalism is to give people the information they need to make better decisions. In other words, journalism is supposed to empower.

This definition implies that while journalists certainly inform, there is an assumption the reader will sooner or later use the information to make a decision or engage in some kind of activity.

“

Viewing the reader as less a consumer or audience member and more a decision-maker is a good place for the journalist to start.

”

Empowering the reader thus involves anticipating how the information might be used and what questions the reader might have about the issue or event.

Often it’s obvious and easy. A story about an eclipse will almost certainly include where it can be seen and when.

Questions and answers about other stories are more difficult.

Political coverage, for example, focuses on issues, personality, or the campaign process. Often, however, stories leave out information the voter needs to make informed, as opposed to emotional, judgments.

Issue coverage may fail to raise, much less answer, questions people care about. The candidates decide what they want to talk about in the campaign while citizens are relegated to being observers.

Personality coverage must compete with the carefully crafted images portrayed in advertising, strategic communications, or political theater.

Coverage of a candidate’s strategy and methods can make the horse race more interesting but does little to help the voter make a decision about issues or beliefs.

Viewing the reader as less a consumer or audience member and more a decision-maker is a good place for the journalist to start. In one sense it’s about self-respect – an assumption the reporting will have some utilitarian value – and respect for the reader, a belief that the audience really does want to make the best possible decisions.