A trick for adding context, from plane crashes to soda contracts

Here’s an experience that will feel familiar: You are rabidly consuming an interesting news story when you realize that there’s a critical piece of information left out.

You scan the story again to make sure you didn’t miss it. You check the byline to make sure it’s a reliable, human-generated piece. Heck, maybe you even think about reaching out the reporter to lightly question them. You know, as a member of the journalistic intelligentsia. (But of course you don’t, because that would be gross.)

My favorite example? A breathless print piece I saw years ago about hikers in the Catskills finding plane wreckage from a decades-old crash/missing aircraft … with no mention of the pilot, passengers or remains.

Look, if I’m out hiking and I find a plane crash, I’m freaking the hell out about the humanity of it. As I read, I found myself completely distracted by the reporter’s failure to answer my basic question: Are there bodies in the wreckage?!

So how do we help our students avoid that basic journalistic sin of leaving the audience with questions? I use what I call “the who-what-where-when-why-how noun breakdown” (or “the noun breakdown” for short).

It’s simple: A reporter should examine every person, place and thing in their story and ask, “Did I explain the who-what-where-when-why-how of each of my nouns?”

And it’s not as formal or time-consuming as it might seem at first; it’s just a tool in your kit to make sure your story is air tight.

In the case of our Catskills plane wreckage, we’d ask ourselves about the plane — Who flew it? And just from that first query, we realize there’s a hole in our story that leads us to add the information, or at least ask more questions for our audience.

This week while scanning student headlines, I saw a great story about a university soda contract that didn’t say how much the university makes each year from said contract, and a thoughtful piece on ghost enrollees at a community college with no statistics locally or nationally about the number of fake students.

Editors, professors and advisers can teach this trick to empower burgeoning journalists to gut-check themselves and avoid confusing their audiences (or annoying them with unanswered questions).

On to this week’s headlines!

"I'm sorry, but your name's not on the list."