by Alex Hager
Writing on deadline can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to reduce the quality of your work. In this first chapter of America’s Best Newspaper Writing, experienced reporters explained how to make the most out of a story during a time crunch.
Although the news cycle is fully and unchangeably 24/7, there is still a need for deadlines and an ability to write on them. It’s (relatively) easy to gather and disseminate information for a story on a deadline, but the biggest struggle can often be telling that story interestingly, creatively, and captivatingly.
The best way to help yourself write in a time crunch is to prepare as much as possible before hand. Pre-writing or even just pre-researching can help give a story a skeleton before it’s filled in with details, facts, information, or narrative storytelling. This saves time and energy as a reporter learns details of an unfolding story.
Another important skill needed to write on a deadline is the ability to write as you report. Not only is it helpful to write before, but it’s also useful to write during. By collecting information in a strategically structured way, it’s possible to build your story before it’s even completely written. This, however, requires special attention to detail during the editing phase, as you may have to catch more mistakes than usual.
The media world is full of gleaming stories written on a tight deadline, but the general public often doesn’t realize that. First and foremost, the best stories completely hide the struggles or panics going on behind the scenes of a story. The best stories present a polished finished product, tight to the point that a reader can’t tell the difference between a story that took a week to write and a story that took half a day.
Sometimes, the recent nature of the events portrayed might suggest a tight deadline. And in a 24 hour news cycle, that’s often the case. For example, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending immigration from certain countries and banning refugees from entering the United States, reporters have been searching for interesting human interest angles.
This story from Washington Post reporter Patricia Sullivan tells an intriguing tale about a D.C. area-church that was planning to host an Afghan refugee family, only to learn that their soon-to-be-guests had been held up in accordance with the executive order. The story is informative but also captivating. The reporter most likely wrote this story on a deadline, simply because the story had to get out while the executive order was still a relevant topic. However, the article makes no compromises to quality or storytelling. The pacing and narrative hold the reader’s attention, but still provide a lot of quote-based and fact-heavy information.
The 24/7 news cycle has, in some ways, changed our very definition of the deadline. Now, a deadline can simply be “as soon as possible.” Although news organizations generally prioritize accuracy over immediacy, there is a huge rush to get news out before a competitor, and simply to get it out as soon as it is available. In some cases, like the example below, an article is posted about an event before the event even ends, and is updated as it unfolds.
Written in part by Elon alumnus Michael Bodley, this San Fransisco Chronicle article chronicles a wild night of protests at The University of California at Berkeley in response
to a school-sponsored appearance by conservative writer Milo Yiannopoulos. The story is long and informative, and was composed by compiling information immediately as it became available. One of the strongest elements of the article is the way it integrates pictures, video, and relevant links.
This final example meets a more traditional definition of deadline reporting. This article was featured on the front page of the New York Times national section on Wednesday, meaning that it was certainly published before a deadline. This story is, above all else, an excellent example of captivating narrative storytelling. Well it certainly includes facts, this story almost reads like a novel, incorporating people and intimate details of their lives to capture the reader’s attention. A creative story telling tool employed by this story is the use of compartmentalizing certain sections and storylines. By putting each under a different subhead, it allows the author, Kirk Johnson, to efficiently organize his content.
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