How to Write News Articles

Series Summary

Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Those questions are the tools of any sincere journalist interested in telling a story in as fact-rich and objective a manner as possible. They help outline the essential details for almost any occasion, from birth, to scandal, struggle, triumph, and death, keeping the focus of a news report on the measurable. For it is only from the everyday material that we can derive what is immaterial and form theories and opinions.

And reporting the news is not an easy thing to do—not by any stretch of the imagination. A journalist’s calling is to dig beyond the surface, to assemble and synthesize details to form a cohesive whole, a picture of something not readily apparent. Thus reporters serve as heralds of the daily goings on, keeping each of us apprised of the important things happening locally, regionally, nationally, and globally.

In this free journalism training series on video, learn how to write newspaper stories like a professional reporter. Our expert will show you how to get started with an interview, how to write using the inverted pyramid, how to create an eye-grabbing lead, headlines, and more. Extra, extra! Today’s the day to start down the road towards that Pulitzer.

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Peggy Charleton from Expert Village and today I would like to talk to you about how to write in a journalistic style manner that could be for a newspaper or anything else you are interested in on the journalistic style. This is good for also if you ever wanted to write a feature story or something and you can do that and do a freelance type writing where the AP work could pick you up which is something that happened to me once. And so you just basically need to have several skills to do this to write journalistically and I'm going to start out with your interview process first. The first thing you're going to do to write a news story is to gather your facts. And that's in an interview process and you need to write your questions up beforehand probably ten to twenty questions beforehand because if you get out there unless you're a season journalist sometimes you don't know what to ask back and forth and if you have them written down then its a great way to start. "