News Storytelling

How do you tell a story when you are not allowed to invent any of it? News sits one rung up the permission ladder from documentation: you may select and arrange, and you may not make things up. This course covers what news is actually for, why the inverted pyramid puts the ending first and what that does to withholding, how to find the owner of a story about a policy, leads that are honest rather than merely arresting, attribution as the load-bearing habit, what you may and may not do to a quotation, numbers and the context that makes them mean something, the difference between a news story and a feature, corrections as a craft rather than an embarrassment, and the specific temptations of narrative journalism. Built on the six decisions from How Stories Work, with the discipline of verification as the thing that separates journalism from everything that looks like it.

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