RFTM Ch. 10: The Body of a News Story

The portion of the story that follows the lede is the body. The body offers details amplifying, supporting, building and detailing the lede.

The most basic type of story body is known as the inverted pyramid. In an inverted pyramid, writers arrange information of descending importance or newsworthiness, in this kind of order:

First paragraph: the lede
Second graf: The nut graf
Third graf: first most-important bit of detail
Fourth graf: second most-important bit of detail
Fifth graf: third most-important bit of detail
... and so on

The advantages of an inverted pyramid are: it helps reporters prioritize information; it helps new reporters find missing elements in a story; it's easy for readers to understand; and it's easy to write and edit quickly (making it especially useful in breaking news situations).

The disadvantages include: it concentrates on basic facts, not leaving much room for context and meaning; it can be boring to read; and it locks reporters into formulatic writing, allowing less flexibilty.

(Having said that, it is a basic writing style that works well as a default style if you're getting confused on how to write something. You can always fall back on an inverted pyramid and be okay.)

In organizing an inverted pyramid story, of course we start with the lede, which we've already gone over. The second graf is known as the nut graf, which does two big things: first, it answers questions created by the lede; second, it offers a logical transition to the body of the story.

For example, let's look at a lede from a previous exercise:

A 22-year-old man speeding at 100 mph crashed his car and died, just 15 minutes before his wedding was to begin this morning in East Lansing. 

This lede creates several questions: who was the 22-year-old man? When, exactly, was the crash? And where, specifically? Why did he crash? And so on.

Those exact details were probably left out of the lede for brevity's sake. But now we can add in some of those details via a nut graf, like this:

Scott Forsythe, who was to wed Sara Howard, was trying to avoid a dog in the road at the time of the 8:45 a.m. crash along Kirkmann Road.

Now, let's pair the lede and nut graf, and see how they symbiotically support each other:

A 22-year-old man speeding at 100 mph crashed his car and died, just 15 minutes before his wedding was to begin this morning in East Lansing.

Scott Forsythe, who was to wed Sara Howard, was trying to avoid a dog in the road at the time of the 8:45 a.m. crash along Kirkmann Road.

The nut graf doesn't mimic or echo the lede; it builds upon it, by filling in details from the lede. Then, we can start a narrative telling in the body of the story.


Another way to pair a lede/nut graf combo is to do an alternative lede. In such cases, the lede (rather than being a summary of how things ended up) can be an anecdote that conveys a more human and relateable example of the bigger issue. (In such cases, the lede may actually be two or three grafs, or more.) Then, the nut graf (much like a traditional lede) sums up the issue bottom line.

For example, a hypothetical story about students struggling to pay for tuition may start with a two-graf anecdotal lede, and then go to a nut graf, like this:

Joe Schmo is a college student, but his day consists of far more than class.

Schmo, a sophomore at Michigan State University, works six jobs in addition to attending six hours of class each day. He works as a waiter, a clerk, a mime, a bookie, a pilot and a rodeo clown, all in an effort to cover his $25,000 in annual tuition payments, he said.

A growing number of students -- like Schmo -- are having to work while attending college, with the number of students engaged in work-study increasing by 500 percent between 1993 and 2013, a recent study found.

With an anecdotal lede, we try to take something big -- like student struggles -- and break it down into something that's easier to relate to, in this case a single student's struggle.

Now, in picking which way to lede a story, we don't base it on what writing style we prefer. Rather, we select the one that best tells the story, and allows readers to best relate to what makes this story interesting, relevant and.or useful.

(This is another big difference between writing for English composition and writing for journalism. In English comp, we write for personal expression and artistic reason. It's all about us. In journalism, we write to contextually and accurately represent the facts we've discovered, and for reader understanding of the story. It's all about the readers and the truth. We may use creative and artistic techniques in telling the story, but we do it based on the facts and reader comprehension, not our own personal expressiveness.)

Then, we continue with the news in the body of the story. We more fully explain how things unfolded or happened. We offer quotes and descriptions. We offer more detail and reaction.

Also in the body of the story, we explain the unfamiliar. We avoid or translate words that are not used in everyday conversation,or that are jargon, as we blogged about earlier. We can translate terms (like, instead of saying cardiac arrest, we use the more conversational heart attack).

Or we can define terms (by saying something like, the man suffered cardiac arrest, commonly known as a heart attack), helping to make a complex story more understandable, and teaching the audience something that may be useful or interesting.

Examples are important, too. Citing examples can help factually justify your summations; make stories more readable and interesting; they can personalize stories and make stories more understandable and relateable; and make concepts more understandable by comparing them to things that are familiar.

In journalism, we try to remember a concept of show, and don't just tell. That is, don't just tell me the news; show me the proof through quotes and data and such. In the lede and nut graf, we generally tell. But in the body of the story, we must show.