Newspapers 101

The meat of your newspaper is made of news stories or features: a story about a topic, incident or person of interest. A news story might be about a news conference, a disaster, a trend, a personality profile or an investigation.

• You may have heard of the five Ws and H: “Who, what, where, when, why and how.” News reporters try to answer these questions in their stories. If they don’t, they’re likely to have their editor send it back to them for additional work.

• News stories should be timely: They should run in the paper soon after the event happens or the news is announced. You’ll often see a mention of this fairly early in a story: “Thursday, officials revealed ...” We call this a “time peg.”

• Most reporters are trained to make their first sentence as catchy as possible — frankly, this is aimed at capturing a reader’s attention and encouraging them to read further. We call this “the lede.”

• After that first sentence, you’ll often see reporters cite important facts next and then maybe go into background material or reaction from other people. Journalists call this “the inverted pyramid.”

  

• Reporters are taught to integrate quotes into their stories. They’ll often call this “attribution.”

• The more complicated or controversial the topic, the more sources a story should include.

• A news story should try to cover an issue from several points of view. If the city wants to build a new highway, for example, you might see reaction from frustrated drivers as well as homeowners whose property values might be affected.

• ... from everyone’s point of view except that of the reporter. If the reporter writes her or his own views or begins writing sentences with the work “I” in them, then the news story is more of a column and should be treated that way.

• And some news stories aren’t really news stories at all — they’re what we call feature stories. They might take a longer view, be arranged in a different way and might push some important information lower in the story. This is done for stylistic purposes. These longer, more entertaining stories are sometimes referred to as “readers,” as in: “My piece for Sunday isn’t really breaking news. It’s a reader.”

• Typically, a story that starts on a cover has to continue on an inside page. We call this a “jump.”

• Reporters don’t typically write the headlines on their stories. This is done by the editors who proofread stories for typos and errors: the copy desk, or just “the desk.”

• Reporters usually work with several layers of supervision. Metro news reporters report to the metro editor, goverment editor or assistant city editor. Sports reporters report to a sports editor and an assistant sports editor. The same applies to business and features staffers. Photographers report to a photo editor, designers to a design editor and the copy editors report to the news editor.

All of them report to a managing editor, Joe Palmquist. And he reports to editor Rob Curley.