NEWS WRITING PLAN & STEPS

• The following is an excerpt from The Elements of News Writing by James W. Kershner (Pearson, 2009):
1. Select a newsworthy story. Your goal is to give a timely account of a recent,
interesting, and significant event or development.
2. Think about your goals and objectives in writing the story. What will the readers want and need to know
about the subject? How can you best tell the story?
3. Find out who can provide the most accurate information about the subject and how to contact that person.
Reveal what other sources you can use to obtain relevant information.
4. Do your homework. Research so that you have a basic understanding of the situation before interviewing
anyone about it. Check clips of stories already written on the subject.
5. Prepare a list of questions to ask about the story.
6. Arrange to get the needed information. This may mean scheduling an interview or locating the appropriate
people to interview.
7. Interview the source and take notes. Ask your prepared questions, plus other questions that come up in
the course of the conversation. Ask the source to suggest other sources. Ask if you may call the source
back for further questions later.
8. Interview second and third sources, ask follow-up questions and do further research until you have an
understanding of the story.
9. Ask yourself, “What’s the story?” and “What’s the point?”. Be sure you have a clear
focus in your mind before you start writing. Rough out a lead in your head.
10. Make a written outline or plan of your story.
11. Write your first draft following your plan, but change it as necessary.
12. Read through your first draft looking for content problems, holes, or weak spots, and revise it as necessary.
Delete extra words, sentences, and paragraphs. Make every word count.
13. Read your second draft aloud, listening for problems in logic or syntax.
14. Copyedit your story, checking carefully for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and style problems.
15. Deliver your finished story to the editor before the deadline.

STORY ORIGINATION
• One of the most crucial steps to writing a story involves gathering information about your topic. To do so,
you need people who witnessed the event first hand or have extensive knowledge on said topic.
• In writing, especially in journalism, the information you use is the heart of your writing. Perhaps without
details, sources, evidence, one’s writing will not have the intended impact of informing your audience.
• Good reporters don’t wait for the news to come to them, they search for it. They should learn how to
develop their own stories. The editor may assign the reporter to cover a news conference, but it is up to
 the reporter himself to determine how to develop his news story, what is newsworthy, and what angle he
will cover. A good reporter should know whom to listen to and how and where to look for news. He/she
may find news in:
- Press releases
- Tips
- Records
- Localizing/Regionalizing
- Follow-up stories
- Unannounced stories

WHERE TO FIND NEWS?

PRESS RELEASES:
- Press releases may be the origin of a good story. They are usually written by public relations
professionals serving a certain company or government agency.
- They have some limitations that the journalist should be aware of:
a- They might not tell the complete story.
b- They pass the information on in a way that favors the government or the company they serve.
• Therefore, journalists should be careful not to be manipulated by those
press
• releases. The latter should be examined, and reported with a critical eye.
• Press releases are potential starting points for stories.
- First step: a reporter should check whether this press release contains news.
- Second step: if yes, a reporter should find someone to lead them in the right direction. Every release
designates someone as a press contact and gives that person’s phone number. The target of contacting this
person is to verify that this release is authentic.
- Third step: start reporting and looking for facts, checking and re-checking.
- So, scan press releases, but remember they give only one perspective and should serve only as a starting
point for a story. Look for buried story angles, or approaches, that might make a story more interesting
than the one the organization sending the release is trying to sell.
TIPS:
• Tips are information that a reporter receives from different sources, either on the phone, through e-mail,
or in person.
• These tips aren’t always true. They may be trying to make scoops.
• Some reporters ignore these tips, but all good reporters will check them
out thoroughly to try to find evidence whether they are true or not.
 • Keep an ear open to tips. Often they are provided by people you have cultivated as
• sources by calling them regularly and showing an interest in what they do.
RECORDS:
• A reporter can find a news story when looking in official reports such as police records, court records…
• A reporter can build a news story on the information he/she finds in these records.
LOCALIZING/REGIONALIZING:
Localizing:
- It is when you deal with a certain topic or issue on a local scope.
- The effects of inflation and unemployment are examples of international stories that a reporter can
localize, and humanize by looking at how people are coping in their readership area.
- International and regional stories can be useful sources of local story ideas.
Regionalizing:
• - Regional stories evolve from what starts as a local issue.
FOLLOW-UP STORIES:
• Many news stories require follow-up, trying to answer the question “Why?”
• Any major news story suggests dozens of follow-up stories. These follow-up stories can be written as
investigations or feature stories. These pieces will answer the plenty of questions that evolved from the
main news story.
• Often the best source of original stories is your newspaper. Think about what questions initial stories don’t
answer. Think about whom the news affects.
UNANNOUNCED STORIES:
• These are stories from daily life experiences.
- Staying alert: keep your eyes and ears open.
- Brainstorming: reporters find story ideas by sitting down and working up a quick list
of topics that might interest local readers.
- Wandering: walking around.
- Reading: to find stories, reporters can track blogs, discussion groups, and local news sites.
- Questioning: Ask questions about things that grab your attention. Most questions may lead to simple,
unsurprising answers, but some might lead to a story.

WHERE TO GET INFORMATION FROM?

A REPORTER’S RESEARCH TOOLS
• In our days, with the internet and smart devices, and with the spread of digital media, information is
cheap. It is everywhere. It is accessible for everyone.
• Therefore, the reporter’s challenge is to get the best information.
 • The reporter may get the information from:
- Internet
- Experts
- Archives
- Databases
- Basic references
INTERNET
• The Internet can be an excellent starting point for reporters to get ideas of news stories, to get background
about these stories, to find new angles for old stories, to find key facts, and to find or locate sources.
• But using the Internet as a source for their stories is also risky, because many mistakes may happen…
Mistakes in names, details, facts… So the reporter should be very careful and should search for the correct
information, and verify all information. Google is not the right place to verify your information. “The web
is not a place to find answers. It is a place to find clues to answers”.
• A reporter should have a search strategy. Each news story may require a different search strategy.
• Using Credible Sources
• One of the most important things in any form of writing when using an outside source is to make sure they
are credible. A credible source is someone or a group of people respected in their fields of study. A Harvard
Law professor is going to be a more credible source than a freshman at your local community college
when looking for information about the law, for example. If even one of the sources that you cite in your
work is not credible, every single one of the other sources in that piece will be called into question.
Credible sources are not hard to come by, but you must take the extra time to make sure that nothing your
sources are saying could be called into question for credibility.
• According to Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to
determine if your sources are credible. Below, we expanded on some of these questions to better
understand them:
1. Who is the author?
• A credible author is going to be someone that has extensively studied the specific field you are writing
about or need information about.
2. How recent is the source?
The time in which a certain source was published will be important depending on what your topic is.
3. What is the author’s purpose?
• A very important thing to keep in mind when deciding to use a source or not is what the standpoint of that
source is. Is it neutral or is it biased to one particular side? This can be very detrimental to your writing if
you only choose sources that limit your information to one side of a debate.
4. What type of sources does your audience value?
 • What this question essentially means is that you need to write to your audience, so you should use sources
that could be respected by your audience. Peer-reviewed journals and research logs would be a good
source for academics and professionals, but people in your hometown might not value that as much as a
mainstream source of information.
• Websites and Domain Names: One way to get a quick idea of who is sponsoring or publishing a website
is to understand the domain name portion of the URL.
.com Commercial businesses and for-profit organization
.edu Educational institutions
.net Organizations directly involved in Internet operations
.org Miscellaneous organizations that don't fit any other category, such as non-profit
groups
.gov Any government organizations
~ (tilda) Web pages created independently by individuals
country codes A two-letter international standard abbreviation such as ".de" for Germany or
".uk" for the United Kingdom
.ac.uk The .ac refers to "academic" and is used by United Kingdom universities

EXPERTS
• Some reporters rely on what was reported before. So they go to the same sources and make interviews
with the same people interviewed by other reporters.
• A reporter should try to find new sources with high credibility. Look for qualified
experts who don’t appear frequently in mass media.
• Good sources provide insight, credibility, colorful and provocative quotes in news stories.
ARCHIVES
Reasons why a journalist should check the archives:
• To get important background information.
• To see what was written about the topic before.
• To find new angles of the story.
DATABASE
• Statistics give the news a sense of authoritativeness. Readers like to see information quantified, either in
tables or graphs or inside the text itself.
• Therefore, reporters should provide readers with statistical information, numbers,
percentages...
 • Statistics can be retrieved from reports or official websites. A reporter should go back to official records:
Police records, judiciary records…
• A good reporter knows how to use records.
BASIC
REFERENCES
• A Dictionary: A good reporter should always refer to a good dictionary to search for definitions.
A dictionary remains a more credible and trustworthy reference than Google.
• An Encyclopedia: Encyclopedias can help with background on what to expect from the
• news. It can provide context, and also a brief history of the topic the reporter is covering.
• A Phone Book: A phone book helps a reporter find contacts (residential contacts or business contacts,
authority contacts…). It also helps finding addresses and double-check the spelling of names.
• Maps: It helps in searching for locations, addresses, places. This information can be helpful for providing
verified details and information about the topic the reporter is covering.

KEEP IN MIND
- Look back in order to look forward. Research can help you find story ideas, sources, and key statistics for
a story. Its value is to show you what was written about the topic elsewhere.
- Double-check: Sometimes, the data we get is old. It is not up-to-date. This data should be verified before
being used.