Some of our stories forgot one of the five W's: when did this interview take place?
According to the text, it was today.
So, including basically whatever day you wrote this or submitted it
would have covered that base. Hell, even if you simply said today, I would have counted it.
That's no small
miss. Timeliness is key characteristic of news. A car accident that
happened yesterday is news; one that happened five years ago, not so
much. We need to show the audience that the news is also new (you can't spell news without new, and that's the reason new is the root of news), and we do that by offering a time element.
Probably the best place to put that W would have been with your first attribution; e.g., People don't get enough sleep, researcher Diana Gant said today.
We need to make sure all five W's are answered somewhere in every story we write: who, what, when, where, why and how.
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