Notes: The Process of News Writing

• Idea Stage
  Developing the premise. Deciding how/why this story is important to the reader.
• Collect/Gather
  The “reporting” part of the process. Involves research, interviewing and assembling data.
• Organize/Analyze
  Reviewing notes and material. Involves critical thinking. The idea is to synthesize, clarify, evaluate and cull your material – also determine if you need to collect more material to support the theme/focus of the story. (In working on complex stories, it helps to transcribe your notes.)
• Inventory
  Here the goal is to develop a rough inventory from your notes – quotes, anecdotes, key ideas and so on – that support the theme (or main point) of your story. This is not meant to be an outline, but rather an informal “grocery list” of the material culled from your notes – ideally sketched out on a single sheet of paper.
• Structure
  Using your “grocery list” of key points and strong material from your notes, develop a game plan for your story. This can be as simple as mentally sequencing the items, i.e., “I’ll open with this anecdote, go to that quote and then bullet these percentages” and so on.
• First Draft
  Working from the rough outline/sequence you’ve created, write a first draft of your story – always keeping in mind the one point/idea your reader needs to know (focus).
• Revise/Rewrite
  Read your story with a fresh eye to determine.
  • What’s missing?
  • How you could have said it better?
  • What you might do to make it “sing”?

– Author Unknown