Writing Stories and Loving Ethics

Paul Glader-Professor at the King’s College New York, founder of VettNews and executive director of the The Media Project and its non-profit news organization ReligionUnplugged.

He is on Twitter @PaulGlader

“The Media Project is delighted to help fund and program the European Journalism Institute. Our training week in Prague is meant to bring together student journalists and early career journalists from East Europe, West Europe and beyond to explore how to cover religion, business, politics and other topics. We look at innovation and the entrepreneurial future of journalism startups, fact-checking, data journalism, photojournalism and social media. Journalism may be going through a current evolution in society. But the future for journalism is bright and now is the time to invest in the future of journalism and future journalists.”

Paul Glader has shared with the EJI 2019 participants the secrets of pitching an idea to editors:

Here are the questions you need to answer to in your pitch:

1. What specifically is the story about? You should be able to summarize it in one or two sentences.
2. What kind of story is it? Is it an investigation, an analysis or a holistic review?
3. What is the news value? Especially when you are not writing about a trending topic, you need to show why this news may be valuable at that moment.
4. What is the story angle? Which angle do you take to explore the story? The choice of the angle is extremely important and may change the result completely.
5. How do you news gather? What or who are your potential sources, where do you take your facts from?
6. Why is it right for this publication? You need to explore the publication before sending the pitch in order to understand how you stoy can fit in their style and signature.

Mr Glader also shared his opinion on ethical journalism. According to him, ethical issues must always be taken into account in any story we write:

• How do I avoid burning my source?
• Should we approach people or companies we are writing about before we publish?
• How far we can go to get information?

Sticking to the SABEW and SPJ code of ethics may be a good start for journalists.

Mr Glader has also discussed the structure of narrative non-fiction stories, that are usually 1000-2000 words and are called entreprise features. Sticking to this formula will make your business reporting much more solid and interesting.

1. The Hook – opening the story with an anecdote, a small incident that will bring us to the core of our story.
2. The Who – citing a quote from the key character of our story.
3. Nut graph – writing a paragraph that explains the context of the story.
4. Quote – citing a quote from another key character of our story.
5. Answer to the problematic shown in the nut graph – using data, expert quotes, the company and industry statistics.
6. Meaning/context graf – writing a paragraph that will explore the context and the real meaning of our story.
7. People context – putting the story in the context of other people, above the main characters.
8. Kicker Quote – from one of the key characters of our story. It is a line of newspaper type set above a headline usually in a different typeface and intended to provoke interest in, editorialize about, or provide orientation for the matter in the copy heads.

By Viktorya Muradyan