Great reporting must precede great writing

For beginning reporters, using professional published stories is a great way to show them how newswriting works, from the individual pieces to how complex decision-making affects writing in the media.

Here is the lead from a Washington Post story on the big snowstorm that surprised the D.C. area this week.

Three people were killed Monday evening in Montgomery County when a car collided with a snowplow hours after a winter storm dumped several inches of snow across the Washington region, an area largely spared from blizzards during two years of intermittent pandemic shutdowns.

One person was critically injured in the crash, which occurred about 6:45 p.m. on Columbia Pike at Briggs Chaney Road in the White Oak-Burtonsville area of eastern Montgomery, officials said. Initial accounts indicated that the car had run into the rear of the plow.

The storm brought power outages, traffic snarls on major highways and untimely closures of coronavirus testing sites.

As adults grappled with school cancellations and the suspension of Metrobus service, children ventured outside to celebrate the most snow to fall in one storm since January 2019 — a time when antigen testing was not a holiday ritual and mask-wearing largely was confined to Halloween.

Students must learn that most of the 5Ws and H questions need to be addressed in order to provide readers with a complete account. Who, what, where, when, why and how are still the key starting points in reporting. If young reporters can't answer one or more of those basic questions, more reporting is needed. Some answers simply aren't available immediately, but future stories can fill in the blanks (and should).

An easy choice in our sample lead (above) was to feature the three deaths caused by the storm (though that causation is a bit too simple, since there was likely some human error involved in the crash). Names of the victims may not have been released in time for this story, but the dead are clearly the "who" here. "What" is that they were killed. "When" is Monday evening, while "where" is the Columbia Pike intersection listed. The "why" tends to be complicated but the immediate cause was a car running into a snow plow. The "how" is a bit sketchy, as officials usually take some time to reconstruct how crashes occur. Excessive speed? Unavoidable skidding? An unanticipated stoppage or turn? 

I would also point out to students the way this report combines the snowstorm with the pandemic, and would ask if that was inevitable or whether the reporters and editors of the Post could have made other choices.

My first thought was that the lack of big storms over the past couple years is clearly unconnected to the pandemic in terms of cause and effect. Both are challenges but they just happened to overlap. 

My second thought was that it is relevant to show readers that life is complex and that events certainly can be made worse (or better) by other factors. That fourth graf was a stretch, with its goal (maybe?) to provide some context for how long it had been since the last big snow in D.C. "Wow! It's really been that long?" you can imagine a reader thinking. "I can barely remember a time before Covid."

Would this news story connect with readers without the added pandemic connections? That is a great question to present to student reporters. An in-class activity worth a few minutes might be to ask students to write a new version of this lead but without any pandemic references. After all, the first big winter storm in over two years is inherently dramatic and newsworthy.

A final discussion might get into how journalists make decisions about what to include and what to exclude in their reports. Lots of discrete events occurred during the storm. There were many outages, non-fatal accidents, school and business (and testing center) closings. The story led with deaths, not with the millions who survived the storm. As always, most news is "bad news."

Reporters should cast a wide net, so to speak, and gather all the information and insights they can. The final published stories, however, need some curation, some analysis, and some structure. 

The connection between gathering information (reporting) and presenting information (writing) is the very heart of journalism and students need to practice these basic skills repeatedly.