If our reporting has no clear angle, we lose our readers

Here's a question that kept recurring this past week as I was judging "news writing" for a fall Florida Scholastic Press Association contest. Publications could submit their best news writing thus far this school year, so many media only had a few options, I assume.

Anyway, here is that question: What makes a piece of writing a news story? 

You would think this would not be a source of confusion, but the vast majority of the 60 plus entries did not grow from any sort of event or announcement or other specific occurrence. A new report had not just been issued. A person of prominence did not do something of interest. 

My guess is that over half of the entries involved how the school was reacting to the continuing pandemic, and since these schools are from Florida, that is no surprise. 

But those stories ended up so general and so often focused on "non-news" like, "Well, the new school year has begun, and no one is particularly happy with the continuing pandemic..."

I understand why a reporter would want to chime in on this issue. It obviously dominates school life, but the NEWS about this continuing challenge must include something "new." For instance, the superintendent just announced some new procedures for all positive testing students or staff. Or the principal announced that the entire school must go remote for two weeks due to a large outbreak of Covid cases.

Many times we assign reporters stories but we don't provide them with angles to pursue. It shouldn't surprise assigning editors that send a reporter out to cover "the pandemic" that what comes back isn't what they had in mind.

It comes down to this truth: there are no stories about the pandemic, just like there are no stories about volleyball or the chess club.

There ARE stories about how individual people are dealing with the virus or masking or conflict within their families or vaccine hesitancy. There ARE stories about volleyball players and coaches and spouses of coaches and managers and even fans. There ARE stories about chess players, about how the chess club members react to skepticism from their peers, etc.

Finally, the ancient 5 Ws and H of good reporting -- who? what? where? when? why? and how? -- need to be answered, and in a news story they probably need to be answered quite early in the story. 

The number one question readers ask is "Why am I reading this right now?" 

If we don't provide that answer, they quite smartly move on to something that DOES seem relevant and timely and helpful to their lives.

As I slogged through so many unfocused attempts at news stories I was reminded that high school media has a tough time with breaking news (the reporters are full-time students, after all).

A reasonable piece of advice might be to avoid coverage options that are doomed to fail.