Try these suggestions for finding a focus for your stories as you’re reporting, and before you start to write. If they help, please let us know.

Think First
Finding a focus means thinking about the story before you start reporting. Instead of rushing to snag the usual suspects, ask a few questions early on to help you figure out the best way to approach today’s assignment. Who has the basic facts about this story and do we need them on camera? Who has personal experience with this and who can put the facts in perspective? Where is the central place of this story and is that where we’re going?

When you get to a location, take just a few minutes to look around. Do a complete 360-degree turn: the real story may be behind you. Don’t be so locked in on what the story is “supposed” to be about that you miss what’s really going on.

If you’re struggling with a broad topic, looking for a story within the story can provide a tighter focus to illustrate the bigger picture. If you have a small story that seems unimportant, finding a story behind the story can reflect a larger trend or theme.

Eliminate
Take time to decide what the story is really about before beginning to write. That sounds obvious, but it’s a step many reporters skip, especially on deadline. Try to sum up your story in just a few words–three can be enough. Put the three words on a sticky note and keep it in sight while you write.

Use your focus statement to help you decide what to leave out of your story. Who and what will not be covered in this story and do you have a good reason for that?

Consider what you want the audience to take away from your story. Will viewers or readers know something after seeing this story that they didn’t know before it aired? If viewers can put this new knowledge to use, have you told them how?

Information that doesn’t fit your focus may be useful for a lead-in or tag, or an info-box. It may suggest another angle on the story for another day.

Choose a Format
Only when you know what you really need to say should you decide how to say it. Too many story ideas are pre-formatted before they’re even reported. On television, a court hearing is always a V/O; a weather story is a live shot. In print, a local event is always a brief.

Consider what approach works best for the story you want to tell. Maybe that brief is a photo essay. Maybe that TV story should be something other than a package: Anchor copy, graphic, V/O, natural sound, live or some combination. Deciding how to tell a story before you even know what it’s about is a disservice to the people you cover and the audience. Finding a focus will help you tell better, stronger stories in any medium. That’s a promise.

I suppose it was a no brainer to poke fun at the list this way, but in a surprise move the ridicule  comes from Tribune itself. Literally. Larry Mendte, the legendary former Philadelphia anchor who’s now doing commentary for Tribune, produced this hilarious send up.

Brilliant, isn’t it? While Tribune’s Randy Michaels came under fire for putting out a memo forbidding the use of these words,  I have to applaud the effort to eliminate newsspeak.  I’ve been campaigning against it for years, without much success. Mendte’s commentary should be required viewing in newsrooms and classrooms. Hectoring hasn’t worked. Maybe mockery will.

PS: In case you were wondering, the words in italics in this post are on the Tribune list. And so they should be.

“It’s kind of like a bricklayer knowing he needs to bring certain tools to the job to build a wall,” Schuh said. “He doesn’t think about, do I need a trowel…do I need a mixer, my pickle bucket? No, he just brings all that stuff and then he looks at the blueprint of a job and figures out what kind of wall am I building today.” TV journalists, he said, need to be so certain about the tools of their craft–the shots and sound they need to do the job–that they can focus on simply telling a good story. As Schuh put it, “Once you’ve aced the mechanics of how you build a story, then you can worry about the story line and the plot, the quest, conflict and resolution, the reveal, all these other parts.”

With all the necessary elements in hand, Schuh has one simple goal when he sits down to write: “to get out of the way.”

Sourced from: Advancing the Story

But a bigger reason for the increasing number of mistakes, he asserts, is the changing role of copy editors.

Gone are the days when they primarily detected errors and smoothed prose for the next day’s newspaper. Now they must also operate in an online environment where “search-engine optimization” is a key goal. That requires new skills and time-consuming additional duties.

As a regular reader of the dead-tree edition of the Post, I can vouch for the fact that errors are up and it doesn’t take a retired high school English teacher to catch them. As Alexander notes in his column, a story about an car wreck involving retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw said he had “slammed on the breaks” (brakes). Good grief!

Readers complain the errors aren’t just annoying, they’re damaging the paper’s credibility. “If they don’t care about basics like grammar and spelling, how much do they care about factual accuracy?” one reader wrote. Good question.

But the real question is: Who doesn’t care? To me, what’s happening at the Post and other newspapers reflects a workplace culture that has long tolerated sloppy copy from reporters on the understanding that editors would catch mistakes and fix them. With fewer copy editors on staff being required to shoulder more responsibilities, the cracks these errors can slip through have become chasms.

What these newsrooms need are reporters who understand that it’s their job to get it right before they turn in their copy and who care enough to take responsibility for all of their work, from fact-checking to spelling and grammar. Yes, it takes a little more time to double-check for accuracy but with trust in the news media at an all-time low, don’t you think all journalists should do whatever they can to try to restore it?

Not the stories that came with those labels attached, but the way they’re written. It’s shocking how many worthless adjectives are being crammed into the average newscast! Tragic to think that many writers may not know better. And unbelievable that nothing is being done about it.

Television newscasts these days are awash in hyperbole. Could that be one reason the audience is floating away? Listen to almost any news program, network or local, and you’re bombarded with words and phrases so overused that they have become meaningless. In a 15-minute span one morning, reporters and anchors on one channel promised “stunning new developments” that weren’t in the least bit astonishing, described a Vatican gathering of visibly delighted Cardinals as a “solemn ceremony,” and discussed the possible punishment for a “heinous crime” without ever mentioning what had actually happened.

This kind of writing violates a bedrock principle of broadcast news: It is better to show than to tell. “You can say she’s a devoted mother, or you can show a child jumping into her lap,” says Mike Mather, a reporter at WTKR-TV in Norfolk, VA. “Which is more effective?”

Great writers seek and use specific details, not shopworn generalities, to convey information and emotion. Instead of telling the listener there’s been a tragic fire, provide the facts: Six members of one family were killed. The only survivor is a six-month-old boy, burned beyond recognition. And it happened on Christmas morning. Let the listener decide if that’s tragic.

Boyd Huppert, a reporter at KARE-TV in Minneapolis, put this principle into practice in a story about a spreading grass fire. Instead of telling viewers that the situation was frightening, Huppert described the scene through the eyes of the fire chief: “He had men out there, and he couldn’t see them.”

Writers who turn every car crash into a horrifying accident and every tornado into a killer twister seem more concerned with selling their stories than with telling them. These writers may believe they’re engaging viewers and conveying emotion by using adjectives like devastating, terrifying or alarming. But what they’re really doing is instructing listeners and viewers how to feel about the story, effectively robbing them of the chance to feel anything at all. Telling viewers the next story is “unbelievable” simply invites them not to believe it. Announcing a “surprising” turn all but guarantees that no one will be surprised.

Adjective-stuffed copy is flabby and indigestible, at best. It’s not the way most of us talk, so the result is anything but conversational. Often, it’s just plain silly. How many worthwhile murders have you reported on lately? What’s the point, then, of calling any crime “senseless?” Have you ever heard anything actually whop? Why, then, are we so often told about a “whopping increase” in prices? If the victims were taken to a hospital far away, that might be news and worth mentioning, but why bother telling us they went to a “nearby hospital?”

Sometimes adjectives are simply redundant. Close proximity. Freezing mark. Fatal murder. That kind of writing makes a broadcaster sound ignorant. It undermines credibility and wastes time besides. Does this mean all adjectives must go? Of course not. Just the ones that add no meaning, or worse yet, distort the truth. If you habitually describe all victims as “innocent,” for example, you’ll be wrong when it turns out one particular victim was wanted for armed robbery in four states.

Superlatives are particularly dangerous. If you call a program “unique” you’d better be able to prove it. The same goes for first, last, best and worst. Consider this advice on writing from Turner Catledge when he retired as executive editor of the New York Times: “Play it straight, keep it short, and never use the word ‘unprecedented.’” Or to put it another way, as Charles Kuralt once did: “Just plain old declarative sentences seem to serve best in this field.”

Overcoming adjective addiction isn’t easy. Great writers have struggled to break the habit. The author Willa Cather told an interviewer in 1915, “It was a painful period in which I overcame my florid, exaggerated, foamy-at-the-mouth, adjective-spree period. I knew even then it was a crime to write like I did, but I had to get the adjectives and the youthful fervor worked off.”

Better start now by making time to revise your copy. Before you go on the air, go on an adjective hunt. Set your superlative detector on stun. Give your delete key a workout. The science f Robert J. Sawyeriction writer  uses his word-processing software to launch what he calls “a seek-and-destroy run” for unnecessary words like “very.” Create your own list of wasted words. Capture them. Kill them. Show them no mercy.

Brutal? Perhaps. But tragic? Never.

This article was originally published by RTNDA Communicator magazine, June 2001.

“Sometimes I wonder why we call our work television news ‘stories’ when so many of us overlook the ‘story’ part. We get distracted by deadlines and details, and forget a basic fundamental: stories have characters. It’s so simple. Events happen to people. When you build stories around them, audiences take a stake in those people and their situations. Let viewers see a little of themselves, or someone they know. By using characters, reporters can ground any story in the real world.”

“Find a person. Tell a story. Weave the facts of the news inside it. See news events as daily dramas and the people within them as role-players. When you look beyond a newsmaker’s function and examine the individual instead, you can make almost anyone interesting, from an embattled politician to an overworked detective, to a man on the street, to a civil engineer with a clipboard.”

“Here’s a trade secret—with a proper beginning and ending, the middle of a story will usually take care of itself. You’ll always find it easier to write a piece if, before leaving a location, you already know how it will start and finish. Think of this as planning your entrance and exit routes.”

“When you use a sound bite to either open or close a piece, pair it with a line of track. In an open, that line should precede the sound bite and introduce the moment or character. If you close with a sound bite, it should be stronger than any other words you might write. In such cases, the written line it’s paired with should signal the end of the story. Any trailing sound should amplify or complete that thought, and then close the door on the piece.”

“Endings leave the lasting impressions. No matter how strong the rest of your material may be, a weak ending guarantees a weak piece.”

Want to hear more from Wayne? Here’s a segment of a video portrait of this “frustrated feature reporter”:

Many broadcast journalists have taken to rewriting their stories for the Web by simply adding a new top in traditional print style. But the inverted pyramid  may not work that well online either.

Jacqui Banaszynski, a prize-winning journalist who now teaches at the University of Missouri, suggests a different approach: a totem pole. Instead of lumping the who, what, when, where, why and how at the top of the story, give each element its own label, summary and link.

At a SABEW workshop for business journalists, Banaszynski offered five additional things to keep in mind to improve Web stories:

1. Priority: Be clear about what’s important to know fast. Answer the reader’s immediate questions high in the story.

2. Clarity: Make understanding immediate and easy.

3. Efficiency: Subheads and bullets help to organize your writing and package it in a way that helps your readers.

4. Brevity: Studies show that readers take snapshots of information, meaning they are looking for information in quick, scanable bursts.

5. Common sense: Use unanswered questions as part of your story. Don’t write around unanswered questions, something that frustrates readers.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

Producing a TV news story is easy, too. You just choose the right elements and put them together in the right order. Simple!

The truth is, multimedia journalism is a lot like baseball, the way the Tom Hanks character describes it in  the movie A League of Our Own. “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.”

Just like in baseball, you can improve your multimedia journalism with practice and coaching. I’m often asked to offer feedback on stories, which I’m happy to do as time permits, but it’s occurred to me that it might be more productive to share those critiques so others can apply the suggestions to their own work, if they find them useful.

Along came Kevin Torres, who’s just accepted a new job as a backpack journalist at KUSA-TV in Denver.  He asked for feedback on this story he shot for WSYR-TV in Syracuse, NY:

After I sent Kevin my comments, he agreed to serve as a guinea pig and let me share them. So here goes:

You structured the story well, kept it moving and revealed some surprises. Well done. She’s a fabulous character, and I’m glad you let her speak her mind in the story without feeling the need to sanitize her salty language. The nat sound is really nice and so is your framing.

I think your delivery is just a tad too fast. I had to listen to the story a couple of times to make sure I caught it all, and I’m watching it in a quiet office without any distractions. My advice would be to slow it down. If you’re speeding to keep the story within a time limit, cut something instead of reading faster.

When you introduce a character by name, I like to see the person’s face. Boyd Huppert calls it “a handshake shot.” You’re asking me to meet someone, so I’d like to see what they look like. In this story, we don’t see her face in today video until 30 seconds in. Too long to wait, I think.

The still photo of the woman isn’t up long enough for me to see the injury. Or perhaps, since it’s the first time we’ve seen her face, we have nothing to compare it to. Either way, she doesn’t look that bad.

Not sure about the “body swelled to the size of her medical bill” line. I know what you’re trying to do but I think it overreaches.

I like the standup idea. Using the ruler tied it in to the rest of the story. Maybe it would have worked better with a few additional words: “one hundred miles, one foot at a time.”

That last shot left something to be desired. I know she’s back in the shadows, but all I saw the first time was the leaves. I’d have preferred to see her more clearly there.

Kevin has been in the TV news business for almost five years and he’s obviously  doing very good work as a solo journalist. I wouldn’t have nit-picked his story quite so much if he’d just been starting out. Hats off to him for putting himself out there for this public review.

Oh, and one more thing. If you ask someone to critique your work for free, be sure to thank them even if you don’t like what you hear. It’s just plain rude not to.

Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World by NewsLab’s Deborah Potter and VCU’s Deb Halpern Wenger, CQ Press. 2008.

A Writer’s Coach: An Editor’s Guide to Words that Work, by Jack Hart, Pantheon, 2006.
Useful and funny–a great read and an essential reference from the Oregonian newspaper’s writing coach.

Aim for the Heart, by Al Tompkins, Bonus Books, 2002.
Storytelling advice from a veteran journalist, now on the Poynter Institute faculty.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Ann Lamott, Anchor, 1995.
Inspiring guidance: “Good writing is about telling the truth.”

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman, Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1998
Personal essays on a love affair with words.

In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow, 1938-1961, edited by Edward Bliss, Jr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1997
A collection of Murrow’s brilliant work.

Make it Memorable, by Bob Dotson, Bonus Books, 2002.
Tips and lessons from NBC’s Emmy-award winning national correspondent.

On the Road with Charles Kuralt, by Charles Kuralt, Putnam, 1985.
A collection of TV pieces by one of the best broadcast writers ever.

On Writing Well, 30th anniversary edition, by William Zinsser, Collins, 2006
Reissued in paperback, this informal guide to writing is studded with practical advice.

Read to Write: A Writing Process Reader, by Donald M. Murray, Dryad Press, 1993
A mentor to many writers, Don Murray deals with the barriers writers face and offers a guide for getting over them.

The Elements of Style, 4th edition, by Strunk, White and Angell, Longman, 1999
A classic, still useful after all these years. This edition has an index, which is essential. You can also find it online at http://www.bartleby.com/141/

The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana, Public Affairs, 2003
A collection of short pieces originally written for the Washington Post by writers about writing.

Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud, Harper Paperbacks, 1994
Recommended by news director Scott Atkinson. “The single best explanation ever about the relationship between words and pictures, and one of those books that never, ever fails to give me a fresh set of eyes.”

Woe is I, 2nd edition, by Patricia T. O’Conner, Riverhead Trade, 2004
A fun-to-read guide to English grammar. Honest.

Words On Words: A Dictionary For Writers And Others Who Care About Words, by John B. Bremner, Columbia University Press, 1980.
Easy to use; explains meanings in a way that helps writers make choices.

Writing for Story, Jon Franklin, Penguin, 1994
Advice from a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner on writing non-fiction.

Writing to Learn, William Zinsser, Collins, 1993.
Another Atkinson recommendation. “If On Writing Well is the how of writing, WTL is the why,” he says. “It’s also deeply subversive, in that it explains how the act of writing changes you.”

Click the links if you want to buy from Amazon. (Note: NewsLab makes a small commission on each sale.)

Smaller staffs, shorter deadlines and more platforms to feed. Is it any wonder mistakes get on the air and online? In today’s short-handed, 24/7 newsrooms, it’s more important than ever for anyone involved in producing content to double check it for accuracy. Don’t think someone else will catch even the most obvious errors. They won’t.

This ten-point checklist is designed to help. If you have suggestions to add, please let us know.

1. Confirm information that could be in doubt

* Any unattributed information (information that has no name attached to it) is a red flag, demanding further investigation. Even two sources may not constitute confirmation, because one source may have learned the information from the other. Always ask: How do they know what they know, and why are they telling me this?

* Make sure that anyone claiming to be an eyewitness actually was at the scene and in a position to observe what they are telling you. In breaking news situations in particular, people often sound authoritative when they are actually passing along unconfirmed rumors.

2. Clarify context

* Make sure the soundbites or quotes you choose to use fully capture what each person meant to say. A survey of people who were sources in television news stories found that one person in three said important information was left out of a story and one in five complained that his or her interview was taken out of context.

* If you need to, add information in your narration/track to put comments into context.

3. Look for what might be missing

* Review your story with an eye to significant information or points of view that have not been included. Look at each quote or soundbite, in particular, and ask: Who would disagree or take a different position?

* Contact people whose views are not reflected in the story and give them a chance to talk. If they decline, make mention of that in your story.

4. Review for focus

* Make sure your story backs up your lead. Have you over-reached or over-stated the story?

* Restate the focus of your story, and review the script to see if you have stayed on point or strayed from your focus. (A bonus: This is a good way to find places where you can trim the script to save time.)

*Plug your entire story into a word cloud generator like Wordle to see if your content reflects your focus.

5. Check names, places, titles

* Be sure you have attributed information to the correct source in every case.

* Make sure you have checked the spelling of proper names. If possible, check directly with the source. Press releases can be wrong. Even business cards may not show a current title.

6. Check spelling, grammar, usage

* Spelling and grammar count–especially in this age of graphics, closed captioning and Web usage. If you are not positive about a spelling, look it up. This list of commonly misspelled words can help.

* Read scripts out loud to find and fix grammar and usage problems. If in doubt, ask a colleague or check a reference guide.

7. Do the math

* Stories with numbers must be checked to make sure the numbers add up. Recalculate percentages, percent change, ratios, and the like, no matter where you got them. Online calculators make this much easier than it sounds.

* Check with an expert not involved in the story if you have any questions about how the numbers were calculated.

8. Fact check graphics

* Make sure the information you provide to graphics is correct–especially numbers. Call to confirm all telephone numbers and visit all Web addresses.

* Look at the completed graphic before air to catch mistakes.

9. Be precise about pronunciations

* Make a habit of checking the pronunciation of names and places while you are in the field. Ask people to say their names on tape, so you can go back and listen, if necessary. Use this list of commonly mispronounced words to find land mines in your script.

* If you are new to an area, be extra careful with names and places that may look familiar but could be pronounced quite differently from what you expect. Nothing raises more doubts about your credibility than mispronouncing a word your audience thinks you should know.

10. Screen the finished story

* Be sure that your words and pictures are telling the same story.

* Be sure the narration and soundbites match the finished script, and that mistakes have not crept in during tracking or editing.