All too often, I run into a brand story that is written as an essay, when it should be written as straight news.
Rather than starting with a straight news lead, too many brand journalists and other content marketers ease into a story with background they believe will set up the true lead, which they then will bury somewhere between paragraphs four and seven.
These writers never seem to ask themselves: Are readers willing to wade through all this background material to get to the real news we want to share with them? The answer is: No. Nein. Nyet. They won’t do it.
Get a clue, folks:
- News sells, essays don’t.
- News websites flourish. Essay-based sites do not.
- For more than 150 years, there has been a “news business.” There has never been an “essay business.”
Readers love news. They crave the inside scoop. So give it to them. Tell them a news story about your clients, their brand, their company, their products, their services. Identify the part of your story that is the news – and get to it, immediately.
So let’s talk about how to do that.
Remember, newswriting is NOT an art. It is a craft. It is a formula. It is designed to allow reporters to write something that is easy to read, and do it very quickly on deadline, and do it while a city editor is breathing down their necks. So don’t overthink it. Generations of news writers have used this formula. It works.
Step 1: Find the news peg.
Go through your notes from your interviews with your company's subject-matter experts. Find the thing that is happening right now, or will happen relatively soon. Look for the time element that answers the question, “When did or will this happen?” That’s a good indicator that you have found the news peg.
If you can’t find the time element, go back to your sources and dig for one. Ask your subject-matter experts, “When in your next big milestone?” or “When was your most recent milestone?” A milestone is a significant development or accomplishment in life of a brand, a company, or a product. But it doesn't have to earthshattering. Really, it just has to be both interesting and timely.
Step 2: Build your lead around the peg
Take the “when,” and start adding the “who, what and where. “ Use the active voice. Keep it simple and basic. Here are three leads from recent news stories found on the BBC News web site. I’ve boldfaced the peg for each one:
- Asian markets ended Friday's session lower as investors took their cue from the US and dumped technology stocks.
- Several chimpanzees briefly escaped their enclosure at Kansas City Zoo on Thursday.
- US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is resigning following the problematic launch of President Barack Obama's healthcare law, US media report.
“But those are real news stories,” I can hear some of you scream at me. “I’m writing brand stories for corporate clients. They're not the same.”
Of course they are. News is news.
Before I moved into copywriting and public relations, I worked as a business reporter, covering financial services: banks, credit unions, stock brokerages, accounting firms, bond brokers, sub-prime lenders, and such. I couldn’t afford to wait for these companies to come to me with stories. Most of them wouldn’t know a story if it raised its hand and coughed.
So my approach was: Choose a local company, give them a call and set up a meeting with a top officer. It could be a lunch, or a facility tour, or just a sit-down in the office. I’d let them give me all the background they wanted to give me, carefully listening for anything interesting: an emerging product, an unusual strategy, a coming location, a newly identified market segment … you get the idea. And once I heard anything like that, I started asking questions. My first was always: “How soon does that happen?” Then: “Do you think that’s something your folks are willing to talk about for my column?”
Why those questions? If I didn’t have a time element, then I didn’t have a news peg, and thus I had no news to tak back to my readers. Also, if the company wasn’t ready to talk about that idea, there was no point wasting time on it right now. I could file away the idea for later, when the company might be ready, but for now the job was to dig for something I could use immediately.
Only when I had an interesting idea attached to a news peg, and a willing company ready to tell me the full story, did I move forward. Here are some of the leads that came out of that process; again, I’ve boldfaced the news peg for each story:
- Community Credit Union plans to roll out 11 new Metroplex locations over the next 30 months, using a fast, inexpensive expansion technique pioneered by banks but never used before by a Texas credit union.
- TownBank N.A. is breaking ground on a 10,000-square-foot headquarters at 1522 Gross Road near Interstate 635 in Mesquite, just a block from the bank's current location in a small strip center.
- Mayflower Capital L.L.C. is launching its third venture capital fund, aiming to raise $50 million to reinvest in a portfolio of emerging companies across the nation.
- At age 3, Dallas National Bank is enjoying a growth spurt.
- Flush with $26.5 million in new capital from private investors, Texas Capital Bancshares Inc. is planning to use about 75% of that to power its red-hot Internet bank toward an initial public offering.
- The World Indoor Soccer League says it's ready to sell exclusive rights for a corporate sponsor to attach the sponsor's name to the WISL brand name.
Note that in most of these leads, I’m vague about exactly “when” each will happen. I got more specific later on in each story, but I wanted my leads to sound as close to “right now” as I could get them. That’s why I used verb phrases like “plans to roll out” and “says it’s ready,” to bring the action as close to the present as possible. Readers want to know what’s happening now. Find a way to give them that feeling, even if it’s an illusion. Trust me, they won’t notice the illusion.
This is a process I continue to use today with my clients. Try it. You will be amazed how a news approach will help you take what appears to be mundane corporate dreck and transmute it into gold.
Step 3: Look for the “why and how” to flesh out the lead, and use them to build the second and third paragraphs.
For example, here’s the second paragraph from the Community Credit Union story:
Community will open the locations inside new or remodeled Albertson's supermarkets in Carrollton, Lewisville, Garland and other cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. These "in-store locations" cost about a tenth as much to build as standard brick-and-mortar locations.
If you have a solid quote, work it into the third paragraph. A good quote introduces a human actor, and readers like that. It keeps them in the story. For example:
"There's no doubt we're the first credit union in Texas to do this," says Gary Base, the credit union's president and CEO. "There may be 20 to 25 credit unions in the entire nation that have at least one in-store location. The most they've got is three locations. We're committed to 11. No credit union has tried the in-store approach on this scale.”
Step 4: Arrange the remaining paragraphs into the inverted pyramid.
Once you get past the first three paragraphs, you are just arranging information by what you think is most important for the reader to know. This is the inverted pyramid.
Sometimes the best approach is to just type up your notes into clean, clear paragraphs – and then worry about the order. That’s the joy of cutting and pasting with Microsoft Word. It’s a much easier process than the old days, when we wrote on clunky Royal typewriters
Step 5: When you are done, stop.
Don’t look to summarize, as you would in an essay. When you reach the last useful fact, don’t get clever or reflective. Just stop writing. Really. Just stop.
Step 6: Write the headline.
It’s bad enough when writers bury their leads. But when they compound the problem by writing lazy headlines, they really should be fired.
The point of the headline is to entice the reader to actually read the lead. The point of the lead is to entice the reader to read the second paragraph. And so on, until the story ends.
If you start with a crappy headline, you lose.
Writing a news headline is simple, but rarely easy. Aim to boil down your lead paragraph into eight to 12 words, while keeping the focus on the news peg. If you’ve written a solid lead, the headline should almost write itself. If you struggle with the headline, the problem may be that your lead sucks, and you need to take another crack at it.
A lot of reporters write a headline before they write the lead. Doing so helps them focus their thoughts as they construct the lead. If that works for you, go for it.
When you are stuck: Go to the BBC News web site, and just read leads and headlines until you feel you’ve got the swing of it. Then go back to your own story. When in doubt, ape the BBC. They are the best news writers in the world: http://www.bbc.com/news/
No comments:
Post a Comment