Attract the reader

The intro is the most important part of the news story, because it determines whether the rest of the story will be read.

If the intro is dull the reader will not want to read on. If it is too complicated the reader will give up.

Your time and effort in gathering information and writing the story will all be wasted unless you write a good intro.

Appropriate style

Not all possible intros are appropriate. It would be wrong to write a humorous intro for a story about a tragedy. Serious news stories call for serious intros.

For example, if a man was eaten by the pet crocodile he had reared from an egg, it might seem amusing to use the saying about "biting the hand that feeds you", but it would cause great hurt to the man's family and friends for no good reason (apart from trying to show how clever you are).

Simple steps in writing the intro

Later, we will look in detail at how you gather information for a news story. For the moment, we will concentrate on how you write your news story based on that information.

You will have in front of you a notebook or a tape with a record of one or more interviews which you have conducted. You may also have information from other sources, such as handouts. Wherever your information comes from, your approach must be the same.

Key points

Before you write anything, you have to decide what is the most newsworthy aspect of the story. To do this, let us remind ourselves of the main criteria for news:

• Is it new?

• Is it unusual?

• Is it interesting or significant?

• Is it about people?

Any fact or opinion which meets some or all of these criteria is what we call a key point. All the key points belong in the news story, but only the most newsworthy belong in the intro. It is your job to decide which.

Go through your notes, go through the handouts and, on a piece of paper, list all the key points. 

Now go through the list of key points, ranking them in order of newsworthiness, according to the criteria we have just mentioned. The key point which best meets the criteria will be number one on your list.

Let us do this with the following example.

Information

At 2 a.m. yesterday morning, meteorologists at the Nadi Weather Centre detected a cyclone developing rapidly near Nauru and moving quickly south-west across the Pacific towards the Solomon Islands. They named the cyclone "Victor". At 3 a.m., they contacted the Solomon Islands government warning of the approach of Cyclone Victor. Government officials immediately put emergency plans into operation. They warned all shipping in the area of the cyclone's approach. They broadcast warnings on the radio, and alerted the police, who in turn sent officers to warn the people. By 10 a.m., winds in Honiara were blowing at more than 140 kilometres per hour. At about midday, the centre of the cyclone passed directly over Honiara before tracking into the Coral Sea, where it blew itself out. In Honiara, more than 20 houses were destroyed and a number of other buildings sustained considerable structural damage. More than 100 people are now homeless. Six people were killed. Another 18 people have been treated in hospital for minor injuries. Mopping-up operations have started in Honiara. The emergency services are still awaiting news from outlying districts but believe that Honiara has been the worst affected. Police say that of the six people who died, three men drowned when their car was blown off the road into a river, and two women and a man were killed by flying debris.