What I'm looking for in your writing

So, this is News II. It is an advanced reporting class. You have already been through Introduction to Journalism and News I. You should know the basics by now. But allow let me to lay out for you what I am looking for in your writing.

1) Great ledes. You might have been told in earlier classes that a lede should be no more than 30 words. Actually, that's often way too much. Who will guarantee that a reader will even get that far? No, you have to grab them within the first five to 10 words, fewer if possible. (I'm not saying the lede can't be longer than 10 words, but that the first five words have to be central to the story.)

Remember, the written word has a lot to compete with a lot out there. By the time the audience gets to your story, they often already have an idea about what the story is about. They may have already seen videos or multimedia presentations on the topic. Your writing has to compete with all those powerful distractions. But you must remember WORDS HAVE POWER .. if you don't dilute them.

My advice is that when writing for the Web (or even print) give us the EXCLUSIVE MOMENT. Lead with something that the audience is not likely to already know about, but that is also central and important to the story. Find the right anecdote, the unique fact, the unusual observation, and you may be able to hook your reader into continuing. Good writing will force a reader to spend more time with a newspaper, a magazine or a Web page, and getting readers to spend time with your work is a key factor in the survival of journalism, be it in print, online or video. We will spend part of this semester on the hunt for great ledes, either in outside publications or within your own work.

2) Thorough reporting. You can't find a great lede if you don't know the story well enough. You get to know the story by getting out and talking to people. This is a key skill in journalism. You aren't going to find great ledes or great stories by sitting in your dorm room or staying within the safe confines of campus. This is why I am forbidding the use of Ithaca College students as sources for your stories (unless you give me a damn good reason). Too often, when trying to get three sources, journalism students will be tempted to get one source that is central to the story and then grab two quotes from fellow students and be done with it. No, that won't work. You need to have at least three relevant sources, not Ithaca College students, and sometimes that won't be enough. The number of sources is often dictated by the circumstances. If you cover an event with 500 people, and all you did was talk to the three people who were closest to you, that's not enough. You need to talk to enough people so that you can be confident that you have a full perspective on the story. Make sure you have reported on enough angles in the story so that when you sit down to write that you have enough material to make sense of it for your readers.

Let's look at that example of an event with 500 people to explain what I mean. I don't want you to just talk to three of the closest members of the audience and go home. You should be talking to a variety of people. You should talk to people in the audience, the volunteers, the organizers, the performers or speakers, the people who are affected, who are counting on a successful event. Get multiple sources from multiple dimensions and directions so that you have a complete picture.

Also, do not factor in whatever word counts I give you with an assignment and say to yourself, "Well I could talk to more people, but I think I'm already over my word count." No. Maybe after the next few people you talk to, you find out that your story is something much different than you expected. You may not even use the first three sources you talked to when you find out what the real story is.

So, to repeat, three sources is a minimum, and that's a bare minimum. Sometimes that won't be enough. No fellow IC students. When I evaluate your stories, I will point out where you missed an opportunity to get an interview. So, you should quickly reach a point where you think up on your own all the sources that you need to completely report on the story.

3) Original reporting. I can't believe I have to raise this for students at this level, but I must. The sources you use in your stories must be your own -- people who you talked to. You cannot use quotes from other publications PERIOD. For this class, which will focus on finding and reporting on stories in the Ithaca community, you should consider the professional and student media in this market to be your competition. You would not want to rely on their work to ensure your accuracy. If they got the story wrong, then you got it wrong. And you got it wrong out of laziness.

I also am going to forbid the use of direct quotes lifted from press releases. As an aside, if in the course of your professional career, you ever do use a quote from a press release, you should realize that it is very likely that the words being attributed to the subject had likely never been uttered until some PR flack typed them up. You should interview subjects with a goal of revealing some key piece of useful information that the reader needs to know. The best interviews are the ones that expose a fact, an anecdote or a truth that sometimes even the subject is not aware of. You get good quotes by having a live exchange with a subject, when you get them off guard and reacting with something approaching honesty. And you get none of that from a quote on a press release.

And if you use a quote from press release without saying that it came from a press release, that is a deception and grounds for an F in an assignment.

Here's a warning. If something does not add up in your story, I will check it out. That's when my old reporting instincts kick in. Inconsistencies are red flags for reporters, and a good reporter does not like leaving an inconsistency alone until he or she understands why there was an inconsistency.

Also, you must give a complete attribution for your quotes. Don't just give me a name, but tell me why they are relevant to the story. Include ages, occupation, hometown, ect. if that is relevant. But just a name tells me nothing.

4) Your stories should not include your opinion. You should not cheerlead. Any kind of subjective statement as to whether something is good or bad, or better or worse than something else must be attributed to a source. Unattributed opinion will be taken to be your own, and that will cost you. Any kind of fact or statistic that one side of an issue offers up and may be challenged elsewhere, must be attributed.

5) Story structure. Of course, there is the inverted pyramid, and you may have stories that require that structure. But many of the stories for this class will be features. Now, there are a couple of ways to organize a feature. One is by using an anecdotal story that expresses the central theme of the story, that is explained in the nutgraf that follows. Then the rest of the story is organized by subthemes that logically follow from one to the other, using transitions. Another type of feature is chronological. That also involves the anecdotal lede and the nutgraf, but it is organized by time. This is the story-telling format. We can explore these models more throughout the semester. But your stories require some sort of organizational structure.

OK, those are some of the major issues I wanted to address for the beginning of the semester. If you bear in mind what I have here, you will have a much more successful semester. And really, that is what I want for all of you.

Good luck.