Pulled Quotes

The article “Teller pregnant with twins shot in robbery” on msnbc.com is pretty much your ideal news story. I was surprised by how much this article followed the traditional journalistic rules we’ve been taught in class, since that usually isn’t the case in today’s news stories.

The lead clearly spells out who may have been involved (two teenagers), what happened (shot a pregnant teller), where it occurred (Indianapolis), and when it took place (Tuesday morning).

One thing I noticed in this article is that early on the writer lets the reader know that the woman is in critical condition. This is something I’ve noticed that most news writers are good at doing: giving the most important information, even if it happened last, early on in the piece. One of my big mistakes at the beginning of this semester was that I would leave those important details until the end of the story. Seeing writer after writer give bits of crucial information early in their stories has helped remind me to follow this way of organizing the content in my news stories.

The second paragraph, and other paragraphs that follow, basically reword the lead in a more specific way, which is one of the key things to remember in news writing. In class this semester, when Professor Dehnart mentioned that paragraphs in inverted pyramid style should be written this way, I started noticing that that is exactly how good news stories are written. As soon as I started applying this rule, I started getting the hang of writing inverted pyramid style news stories.

The second paragraph names one of the police officers involved and gave a little more detail about the teller. As the story progresses, the writer gives details about the shooting which enhance the story, but aren’t necessary. The writer also starts including more quotes from the police chief and another police spokesman as the story progresses, to give some extra insight into the case.

As well as being written in inverted pyramid style, this story is also newsworthy because it has proximity (since it happened in the United States) and timeliness (since it happened this morning). This article has a great deal of impact. A story about a woman and her two unborn children being put in danger usually has an emotional impact on readers, and therefore has news value. It also has impact because everyone goes to the bank, so technically this could happen to anyone. This story could hit a lot of readers close to home.

Every time I write a blog for this class, I try to find a random article with the most engaging and concise information. After all, a journalist’s job is to hook the reader and lay out the facts, right? So as I scoured different online news sources, the article, “Man planned Superbowl gunfire, feds say,” caught my attention and was, I thought, a great example of proper journalistic writing.

Within the first sentence, the article covers the who, what, where, when, why, and how, and the rest of this concise story even includes a quote from Kurt William Havelock’s father and gives readers some background about why Havelock was willing to “shed the blood of the innocent” as he stated in his manifesto.

As it turns out, he was denied a liquor license for the bar he wanted to open in Tempe, Arizona, which was going to be (try not to laugh) Halloween-themed. The bar was either going to be called The Haunted Castle or Drunkensteins. Finding out this bit of information definitely bumped the stories likeability up a notch for me. Not only was this story journalistic, but it managed to adequately entertain.

We’ll never know if Havelock would have really gone through with firing off 200 rounds of ammunition, and this story isn’t big enough to have had any real news coverage, but the article is a great read with all the important facts and even some humor.