A mentor and teacher of mine once told me that, “Journalism takes time, patience and an understanding of people.” She is right – yet the amount of time people spend reading is rapidly decreasing due to the fact that we live in a digital world. This requires you to be able to tell a clear, concise and artful story. Here are three tips on how to do that.
Tell It Straight
Since news articles have always been written with a linear, focused narrative, maximizing the use out of this is incredibly important. One way to tell an artful yet concise story is to use photos wherever you have descriptive language. For example, look at Anne Barnard’s piece about her journey into Aleppo. In this piece for the New York Times, she paints a vivid picture through words and images of how war-torn Aleppo was at that time.
Move Them Through
Readers scan more than they read. This means that the way your audience moves throughout a piece has changed; because of this, we must change how we write to reach an ever-changing audience.
The viewer wants to read something in a new way, but your article still must achieve the same goal as a regular journalistic piece. I believe that this piece by Lauren Kelley and Alexandra March for the New York Times is on the cusp of a new way of digital storytelling. As you can see while scrolling through the piece, they not only begin with videos and pull-out quotes from interviews with the subjects, but they also fundamentally change how the reader moves through the piece.
Keep It Fresh
Publications like The Guardian have started to use Virtual Reality Journalism. One of their best examples of this comes from the Patagonia video they released in 2018. This exemplifies a new kind of storytelling because it takes the viewer on a journey through a space, which is incredibly important when trying to establish a connection with a story.
To bring it back to what my mentor once told me, I’d like to change their quote – “Journalism takes time, patience, an understanding of people and the ability to be innovative.” Without innovation, you won’t be able to accomplish any of these three tips.