Hooking and Keeping Readers

A chapter summary

Intro

• the online age has made it difficult to get noticed among many
• online readers are fickle and have short attention spans

So what?

• the main question to ask when writing a lead
• web readers are quick to abandon any page they find boring
• the lead (first paragraph) amd the nut graph (the second paragraph) must be informative and INTERESTING
• to increase interest, include strange or unusual facts; what would interest the target audience?
• summary leads: who, what, when, where (often in that order) good place to start
• inverted pyramid: presenting facts in order of most to least important
• this is not a rule; there are instances where it is not very effective
• feature lead: unusual or interesting nature of event, then facts
• newsworthy: traditionally, timelines, proximity, prominence or impact made a story newsworthy; today, wierdness qualifies too
• there are entire websites devoted to offbeat stories

Headlines and Link Text

• battle for reader's attention on the internet
• magazines, newspapers must be paged through; hardly anyone flips through every news story on the site
• be aware of space limitations for link text
• techniques for emphasis: coloured headlines, pictures, video links, first paragraph in bold (ex. MSNBC)
• you won't have the final say in headline, that's the editor's job

A Square Lead in a Round Web

• a good lead is one that works online, takes format, aim and audience into consideration
• aquaint yourself with your publication's standards and formats
• write tightly: lots of information in little space
• online audience is reading the news to find out what's going on, not for literature
• goal is to grab readers and inform them long enough to make them want to keep reading

Getting Your Facts Organized

• after a good lead, good writing with flow must follow
• understand the aspects of the information you want to share
• convey in an engaging and logical manner
• inverted pyramid is a good starting point
• quotes can put faces on events: hows and whys
• less important information is traditionally put at end incase it must be cut to fit a news hole; not a problem online
• hard-news stories have facts first
• soft-news stories can begin with descriptions or anecdotes
• features generally use more quotes than hard-news
• placing contrasting emotions in the beginning is a good way to hook readers
• hard-news stories don't require strong endings, but features need wrap-up

The Future of Journalism

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=71&aid=93527

I just finished reading Steve Klein's piece, My Take. As a journalism student, I think he has something really important to say.

We do our journalism for an audience, not simply for the fun of it. Because of this, we must always concern ourselves with whatever it is that audience wants. It's a fact, I'm realizing more and more every day, that we are the generation of on-demand everything. We are a generation that wants everything at our convenience. And we have the technology to accomplish this.

Print journalism is becoming less and less appreciated. No one wants to wait to get the paper in the morning and have to read through it in hopes of finding an interesting story when they can simply search online and find a host of brief stories on any topic imaginable.

Sad as some may find it, this is what our audience wants.

The newspapers that are still successful today have realized it. They have branched out and run websites with podcasts and videos. This is just the way our world is changing. It doesn't have to be bad. I believe that there will always be a need for journalists, but that the form our work takes must change with our audience.