Welcome to Episode 13 of Reporters Shop Talk. I'm Stu Campaigne, a reporter at BayToday with my colleague Dave Dale. Let’s talk about how we decide on story length. We're going to go back into your print career as well and now you're working in an online forum. We can probably touch on both those issues, but how do we decide what the ultimate — the perfect — story length is for different mediums?
Dave: Well, it's an interesting thing.
I'll start with the print background that I have because working for a newspaper is a little bit different than an online news platform.
We were dealing with the constraints of space and time because our deadlines were firm and our space was limited. So the idea was to write the story and describe what you were doing with as much efficiency as possible, with a timeframe pushing you. Right.
So, a lot of the stories were shorter than you would see online, at some point our basic guideline was 300 to 400 words was a nice, crisp news story that people could digest, but it didn’t leave a lot of room for background, didn't leave a lot of room for multiple sources to be quoted. That was on the news side, for feature writing was different and usually, you weren't writing for deadline and you had additional space set aside for your story. So, news stories were different than feature stories as far as that goes.
Stu: What about the timeline for a feature story? I guess it would depend on the timeliness of the subject, but would you have, say a week or two, even sometimes to prepare them?
Dave: Rarely. But yes, I recall a couple of times where I had a week or so to work on something.
There were a few stories that I just pieced together over months until I was ready or the time was right to finish it off. But that was rare too, usually, a feature was a day or two, while you did other things, you didn't have a whole lot of time for it.
Stu: And, then getting back to the original topic: What are some of the strategies if your story was too short or too long?
Dave: Well. Too short is when you left out a key piece and it came back at you because people were still asking questions about the story and there was no attempt to reference the other angles. So feedback was pretty well your guide for that kind of thing. You wanted to tell as many angles as you could in a very short sort of time and space sort of equation.
Stu: So you're saying, well, you're writing your news article about topic X because you're not sure of the length of the stories of your colleagues. You're kind of just given a general word count and then fitting it all together.
Dave: Yes. Like 300–500 words was it, you know, the editors would get very upset if you gave them a 700-word story when they're thinking and planning the page design around the artwork that they knew they had and the space that was available, depending on what the other stories were available.
And that all changed when resources were constrained and we had fewer reporters, too. So things were a little bit fluid. You would find out before you wrote the story whether or not you were the only one filling that page. Right, and then often there are different techniques to fill the space rather than what we call padding the story, although some of that happened as well.
Stu: Sure. It's not the appropriate technique to get the story to the right length. Would you say it's easier to add or take away?
Dave: Well. We were trained to be efficient writers, so it was always about getting as much bang as you could for each sentence, every word, and they could deal with a shorter story better than they could deal with a longer story. And, you didn't want to leave it up to the editor to do because they just cut from the bottom. Right.
So, you wanted to have a contained story with a front, a beginning and an end. But you didn't want to count on the end being in the story. Right, because it might get chopped off if space wasn't there?
Stu: And that was well known?
Dave: Oh, yeah. You knew that going in. That's why we had the reverse (inverted) pyramid. You get as much as you can in the first part of the story because you didn't know what was going to be the end of the story.
Stu: Sure. I think these are necessary for news articles, but more like, you know, conveying press releases. But I think of things like a police release or something from an organization where you move all the info to the top that's pertinent. And then everything else is kind of, in a way, filler. So in a police release, you have all the stuff at the bottom about, you know, you can contact the police with the numbers. And all these things are important. But if they don't run with every article, it's not going to be the end of the day. And that's the stuff that would get cut.
Dave: Yes. Unessential stuff was always left at the bottom of the story for the editor to cut.
Stu: So, for the listeners out there, if your name appears in the last paragraph for the first time, there's a good chance you just made the cut.
Dave: Yeah, exactly.
Stu: You know, we've talked in the past about I think word count matters a little bit, but I don't think it matters as much as print as it does online. But I think you might have a different take on that.
Dave: Well, there's two ways to look at it. The average reader stops after the headline, the first two paragraphs and reading the photo captions. So your strategy there is your headline needs to attract some attention by giving the gist of the story. If you have a subhead, you add some other aspects to broaden the understanding of what the story's about. You definitely want to have your lead paragraph contain the essentials, not necessarily the same as in the headline or the intro because now you're being strategic with pieces of the puzzle.
So, you know that people might not be reading further than a couple of paragraphs. And then, if you're really good. And have it planned out, your caption in the photo won't just repeat what’s in the headline and the information that was given in the first three paragraphs, you'd want your caption to contain something else. Because studies have proven that people don't get much further than that.
Stu:
And that's a really great way of looking at it. I feel like we do that today and it's something we consciously do, although maybe for some it's just by accident. But you know, I think you're right. And we do our own headlines here, which should be made clear. I mean, the editor definitely has input if needed. But I think most of the time, I would say 95 percent of our headlines are written by staff.
So, you know, the headline obviously is very important. We use a kind of a tag that I call it, beneath it, kind of an introduction piece that you're right, if you just repeat what's in the headline, then you've wasted the opportunity to entice the reader to read more and inform the reader because that reader might not be coming back.
Dave: Well, basically, you're right to take advantage of the opportunity of those three hotspots for engaging and informing the reader. Those are actually the three things that you look at first when you're proofing and sometimes when you're proofing fast, those are the only things you're looking at. When I'm proofing a story, I look for the headline. I read the intro, I read the caption, I read the first paragraph and I read the last paragraph. And then if I have the time, I read the middle. Right. It's just those are the most important things.
Stu: We’re circling right back to where we were about the optimal length for a story. And basically, we're looking at, I think it's 300 to 500 words. I think that's kind of the standard, so similar to, you know, reporting with the Nugget. But I think that's the difference with online is you have that opportunity to you know, if it's not 500, if that article's not enough, you can go to a thousand. Whether you're going to keep anyone's attention for a thousand words is another question altogether.
Dave: Well, part of the strategy I follow, sometimes I like to write longer, but because it's a story of record. For example, if I have four councillors that have spoken to an issue after a motion is passed or not passed, I'd like to try to get them all in there because if you have the space and time you do it, it helps in your networking for future stories because they feel that they've had a chance to be quoted.
So there's a little bit of editorial strategy there as well. It's not necessarily for the reader that I already know has left the story. It's also for the people that are in the story so that they feel that it's a well-balanced story and they go away from it feeling that they had at least a chance to have their opinion on the record.
Stu: I'm right with you on all that. You and I do a lot of council coverage. So let me give you an example. Recently I wrote an article about, and it doesn't matter what it was about, that issue, there were clear sides, you know, forming during the discussion.
But I was pressed for time…I did have a deadline for that. So I had about six different people, I would say, speaking to the issue and it was split right up the middle, three and three. I ended up using quotes for two and two. And I think this is where we acknowledge that we sometimes run into more choices than people realize when we're putting our stories together, where we have to decide, you know, this time, Mr. Smith's opinion on this, it just doesn't make it in. I also found the ones that I left out, I didn't leave them completely. I left their quotes out but wrote it as if they were in agreement with what was being said.
Dave: As a reporter, it's up to us to distill a story into a digestible piece of information. And sometimes that requires making choices on the strength of people's quotes, the veracity of their opinion, whether or not it's well thought out and works. So there is a kind of a rating system, in how people, especially in a council situation, get ink. They have to earn it.
Stu: Yeah, I agree. I really like being able to sit at home and just watch these live streams. There are definitely some disadvantages, but there are advantages in the fact that I can wind it back and play it again and again and again. And it's easy to do. And I almost end up with too much information for whatever story I'm covering. Like, I could probably go on double what I've written. But again, like you said, we're making the choices about what to put in and what to leave out. If something is redundant, I leave it out or try to anyways.
Do you ever find that some councillors, whether it’s because they are good speakers or whatever, they seem to appear in your articles more than others? But I find if I'm on an issue with a lot of interest from around the table, if my usual person has just given kind of a mediocre take on it, this is where I leave them out. Did you ever come across stuff like that?
Dave: Oh, definitely. Yeah. We are sort of doing a job for the reader, right, as well as the people that are leading us through elected office, the job is to inform and entertain and provoke thought from the reader as well as get the message across that people are trying to do. And sometimes it's the right decision to leave people out if they haven't earned a spot in the story enough.
Stu: I think we can leave it there for this week. We started in one place and ended up in another, but it's kind of how journalism goes.
Dave: Well, exactly. The thing to take away from this topic anyway is that we have to package a story. We have to make decisions to create this package. So it's really hard, there's no cookie-cutter for it and there's no precise number of words. It all depends.
