How to Write a Newspaper Article

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworskshops.com and I'm going to talk about how to write a newspaper article. Before you begin writing an article, I'd say the most important thing about writing a newspaper article is the facts, gathering facts. The more reporting that you can do, the more you can get quotes from direct sources, the stronger your story will be. So really gather a good complete set of facts for whatever your article will be about. Begin writing by thinking of a lead. Your lead can be one or two sentences and the lead sentences are truly the most important ones in the article. You want to include as many of the details about who, why, when, what, and where in your lead, your one or two lead sentences. A newspaper article can be thought of as an upside down triangle. The bulk of the information is in the beginning of the story and then as each paragraph below will be slightly less and less information until you reach the end. In your newspaper article you want to include a lot of detailed information such as dates, times, ages of the people involved in the story, and statistics such as the weight of something, or the size of things. Whatever details you can include like that make your story stronger because people are reading information to get factual information. They're reading a newspaper article to get the factual information. Use your quotes, just try to use quotes throughout the story. Often you'll see newspaper writers alternating between a direct quote and a quote that's been paraphrased, but definitely include the sources. When you use a quote include the person's first and last name and possibly their age. Remember that the paragraphs in a newspaper article should stand alone so that if a person stopped reading at the end of a paragraph they wouldn't need to read on to the next they would have enough information. You know that most readers are going to only read part of the story, so try and get as much of the information up front as you can. Writing a newspaper article is important job because you're getting information out and it's really a worthwhile project. So those are some things to know about writing a newspaper article."