news report introduction
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The intro is the most important part of any news story. It should be direct, simple and attention-grabbing. It should contain the most important elements of the story - but not the whole story. The details can be told later.
It should arouse the interest of the reader or listener, and be short. Normally it should be one sentence of not more than 20 words for print media, and fewer for radio and television.
The perfect intro
The intro should be based on the most newsworthy aspect of the story.
The intro should be kept short, uncluttered and relevant to the main story. It should be simple grammatically.
The intro should make the reader want to read the rest of the story.
The intro should be appropriate in style to the story.
Newsworthy
To write an intro, you must first decide what makes the story news. There may be several things which are newsworthy in the story. If so, you have to decide which is the most newsworthy. This will be in the intro.
In this way, your readers or listeners will be provided with the most important information straight away. Even if they stop reading or listening after the first one or two sentences, they will still have an accurate idea of what the story is about.
One simple way to do this is to imagine yourself arriving back at your office and being asked by the chief of staff: "What happened?" Your quick answer to that question, in very few words, should be the basis of your intro.
With some years of experience, you will find that you can recognise the most newsworthy aspect of a story almost without thinking. While you are still learning, though, it is useful to have a step-by-step technique to use. We shall explain this technique in detail later in this chapter.
Short and simple
Your intro should normally be no longer than 20 words. There is no minimum length. An intro of 10 or 12 words can be very effective.
Usually, an intro will be one sentence. However, two short sentences are better than one long, crowded and confused sentence.
The words you use should be short and simple, and the grammar should be clear and simple.
You should not try to give too much detail in the intro. The six main questions which journalists try to answer - Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? - will all need to be answered in your news story, but they should not all be answered in your intro. Try to remember these questions as The Five Ws and H - WWWWWH.
For each of those six key questions, you will need to ask whether this detail makes the story news. For example, who was drowned? A woman called Mary. Suppose it had been somebody else - would the story have been stronger, weaker or the same? Only if this detail makes the story stronger should it be in the intro.
The golden rule for intro-writing is KISS - Keep It Short and Simple.
Attract the reader
The intro is the most important part of the news story, because it determines whether the rest of the story will be read.
If the intro is dull the reader will not want to read on. If it is too complicated the reader will give up.
Your time and effort in gathering information and writing the story will all be wasted unless you write a good intro.
Appropriate style
Not all possible intros are appropriate. It would be wrong to write a humorous intro for a story about a tragedy. Serious news stories call for serious intros.
For example, if a man was eaten by the pet crocodile he had reared from an egg, it might seem amusing to use the saying about "biting the hand that feeds you", but it would cause great hurt to the man's family and friends for no good reason (apart from trying to show how clever you are).
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Simple steps in writing the intro
Later, we will look in detail at how you gather information for a news story. For the moment, we will concentrate on how you write your news story based on that information.
You will have in front of you a notebook or a tape with a record of one or more interviews which you have conducted. You may also have information from other sources, such as handouts. Wherever your information comes from, your approach must be the same.
Key points
Before you write anything, you have to decide what is the most newsworthy aspect of the story. To do this, let us remind ourselves of the main criteria for news:
Is it new?
Is it unusual?
Is it interesting or significant?
Is it about people?
Any fact or opinion which meets some or all of these criteria is what we call a key point. All the key points belong in the news story, but only the most newsworthy belong in the intro. It is your job to decide which.
Go through your notes, go through the handouts and, on a piece of paper, list all the key points.
Now go through the list of key points, ranking them in order of newsworthiness, according to the criteria we have just mentioned. The key point which best meets the criteria will be number one on your list