Chapter Seven:

Story formulas
Moving past the inverted pyramid

This course starts with the inverted pyramid because it’s the single most useful, and most used, structure for basic news
stories. It is not the only structure, though.
Several specific types of news stories have their own standard structures, as well as other individual elements. Some are
so rigid that companies use computers to write the stories. In 2015, the Associated Press began using software to generate
short stories about corporate quarterly earnings reports. In 2016, the AP added minor-league baseball games.
In this chapter, we will consider formulas for covering a few common types of news stories.
For each type, you will be given a list of questions to be answered. These questions collect the basic information each
story must have. No matter what audience you’re writing for and what newsroom or organization publishes your work,
these questions will apply.
In addition, you will be given a specific structure to use when compiling the answers to these questions into a story.
While these structures are fairly common, each publisher will have its own particular rules. One newsroom may prefer
that obituaries always include the age of the person in the lede, for example, while another may insist that it be in a later
paragraph. But most organizations will insist on a degree of consistency for obituaries, so being able to follow a formula is
important.
Finally, we must consider whether using a formula at all is proper. Labelling writing as “formulaic” is a criticism; it
means the writing is predictable, cliched, uninspired. Why are we teaching you to write predictable stories?
• When communicating news, predictability can be a good thing. Let’s say you were unable to watch a key basketball
game, and you’re keenly interested in the outcome. If you look for a news story after the game, you’d expect it to
mention who won right at the top, and ideally to include the score high up as well. After you’ve learned that, you may
want to read about key plays and other highlights, but first you want to know who won. The story could have begun
in many ways, most of them more creative than revealing the outcome. Those ledes may be great for sidebars and
follow-ups. But writing for journalism and public relations is performing a service, and sometimes that means giving
people exactly what they expect.
You might even think of it as fast-food journalism. When you go to Chipotle, you know what you want. It’s not cre-
ativity. It’s not unexpected. You ask for a chicken burrito with mild salsa and that’s what you’ll get. Some news stories
have to be like that.
• You’re probably not good enough to be unpredictable yet. In any training, you get drilled on the basics before you
advance to fancier moves. Painters start with basic shapes; baseball players, with basic throwing and catching. The
formulas presented here are what reporters start with. These rules ensure that your stories are clear and provide the in-
formation readers want and need. Only when you can understand the basics and execute them are you ready to break
the rules.
• Predictability is more efficient. In modern communications organizations, writers may be expected to produce lots
of stories every week to fill the yawning maw of a website. Starting from scratch with every story takes time. Using
formulas for some stories saves time -- time you can use to better advantage on stories that have more potential.

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Speeches and panel discussions

By now, you presumably understand a summary lede should contain some or all of the 5 W’s. But we also talked about
having to figure out which “who” and “what” are the most important, the most central to the story. Consider, for example,
the W’s that should be answered in any story about a speech.
Who ...
... spoke? (This includes names, titles and, if necessary, descriptions of what they do.)
... made up the audience? (What kind of people? How many?)
... organized or sponsored the event?
What ...
... did the speaker say? (Key points and direct quotes)
When ...
... did the speech take place? (Usually, just the day will do.)
Where ...
... did the speech take place? (As with the “when,” don’t be too specific. Depending on the location and your audience,
just naming a building or even a city may suffice.)
Why ...
... was this speaker selected? (You may have answered this by describing what the speaker does under the “who” section.
But sometimes there’s more to say. For example, if a campus speaker is an alumnus, that’s worth including; it the person
was speaking after being given an award at the event, that’s important.)
... was this topic selected? (Was this part of a regular series? A larger event? Is it related to something in the news?)
How ...
... did the audience react to the speech? (This may include general reactions, such as cheering, or individual comments
afterward. However, audience reaction is worth including only if it’s interesting. If the audience applauded politely and the
comments you collected were as boring as “I liked it,” don’t waste your audience’s time.)
The list is short and seemingly simple. Don’t be fooled.
Notice what’s missing: None of these questions can be answered with a statement such as “a speech was given.” Yet time
and again, new reporters will start stories about speeches with sentences such as this:
• Bad: President Donald Trump gave a speech Wednesday.
Why is this bad? Why isn’t “spoke to ...” a good “what”?
Think about how little a lede like that tells your audience. If the president appeared on campus, the speech was likely
arranged in advance. Remember the first thing you learned: News is anything the audience doesn’t already know.
Or think about it this way: A lede is weak if it could have been written before the event happened. Would you write this
lede on a story the day after an election?
• Bad: Someone was elected mayor of Kent Tuesday.
Of course you wouldn’t. That lede wouldn’t tell your audience anything they couldn’t have already figured out. You
would want to specify who won in the lede.
Still not convinced? Imagine you missed the last lecture in a class just before an exam. You ask a classmate what you
missed. “The professor talked to the class,” he says. Ah, great. You’re all set for the exam, then, aren’t you?
Oh, no? You want to know more to prepare for the exam? What if your classmate instead said this: “The professor talked
about quadratic equations.”
That doesn’t help much, does it? (Particularly if the course is, say, Comparative Religions.) You don’t just want to know
what the professor talked about; you need to know what she said.
Yet, when students are pressed to make their ledes on speech stories more specific, they often fall about on listing topics.
• Bad: President Donald Trump spoke about patriotism during a speech Wednesday.
Whenever I see one of these “spoke about” ledes, I have the same kind of question: He spoke about patriotism? For or
against?
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 So far we’ve talked a lot about how not to start a story about a speech. Now let’s take a positive approach. (These in-
structions were adapted from material prepared by professor Mitch McKenney.)
Lede
Write down three answers to the W questions: Who spoke (the person’s name and a short description)? Who made up the
audience? What did the speaker say (choose one key point)?
Look at the speaker again, and ask: Is this person familiar to my audience?
With just those questions answered, you’re ready to write the lede on your story.
If the speaker is familiar to your audience, then it’s worth using that person’s name in the lede. The formula:
(Person’s name, possibly with title in front) told (description of audience) that (key point).
• President Donald Trump told a Republican rally that the United States should stay out of the Syrian conflict.
It the person isn’t familiar to your audience, you don’t want to use the name in the lede. That formula:
(Key point), (speaker’s description) told (description of audience).
• If you’re considering a career in crisis management, study psychology in college, an industry veteran told
Kent State students.
Look closer at the three variables:
Key point. You have to choose one. It’s not as simple as picking the first thing the speaker said or the last. Use the news
values you’ve learned to decide which of the speaker’s points will be the most interesting and informative to your audience.
Speaker. Only use a name if it’s already familiar to your audience! Otherwise, use a description that tells your audience
why they should care about what that person says. (Remember what you learned about the purpose of attribution in journal-
ism.)
Audience. Provide a short description that either makes the story more relevant to your readers (“Kent State students,”
for example) or provides context (“a Republican rally”).
Second paragraph
The next paragraph in your story will contain a direct quote from the speaker. Not just any quote, though. It should sup-
port the key point you mentioned in the lede, without sounding repetitious.
The only other thing to consider: If you didn’t name the speaker in the lede, that name should appear in the second para-
graph.
• “We don’t have any business sticking our noses into Middle Eastern tents,” Trump said.
• “Responding to a crisis is not just about communicating facts; it’s also about understanding emotions,” said
Bruce Hennes, managing partner of Hennes & Associates in Cleveland.
Third paragraph
Use this paragraph to fill in any basic W’s you haven’t gotten to, such as where and when. If the speech was part of a
larger event, this is the place to explain that.
• His speech was the keynote address of the fourth annual Career Expo, sponsored by the School of Jour-
nalism and Mass Communication. About 400 people attended the daylong event in Franklin Hall.
Rest of the story
Provide other key points the speaker made, illustrating them with direct quotes as needed. You do not have to provide a
direct quote for every point.
You may also need to fill in other information. For example, if the speech was one of a series, your audience would want
to know what comes next. If the audience cheered or booed, you may decide to mention that. Your editor may ask you to
include comments from members of the audience.
You’re almost ready to write a speech story. Before you do, though, here are two more don’ts:
Mindreading: Writing that a speaker “thinks” or “feels” or “believes,” rather than reporting what he or she said. You
cannot read someone’s mind. Even worse: writing about the audience as if it were a hive mind and you could read it.
• Bad: The audience, skeptical at first, was won over by the end.
• Better: Many audience members asked skeptical questions at the beginning, but by the end each state-
ment was met with applause and even cheers.
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 • Bad: The audience was stunned.
• Better: All chatter ceased.
• Bad: Everyone loved the speech.
• Better: Deafening applause, cheers and foot-stamping continued for several minutes after the speech.
Tick-tocking: Mentioning key points in the order they were delivered in the speech rather than in order of importance.
This is especially bad if you waste words making that obvious to the reader: “He started by saying ... Then he said ... Later,
he added ... He finished by ...”
Why is the chronological approach usually wrong in a speech story? Because if that’s all the reader wanted, he could get
it by reading a transcript. The extra value you should be adding, as a reporter, is not only to condense the speech but to think
about what the most important messages were, no matter when the speaker got around to speaking them.

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Contests and elections

The formula for stories about the results of contests and elections can’t be as rigid as the one for speeches; there are too
many variables. But you can start with a standard set of W’s and general advice about what goes where.
Who ...
... won? (This should include name and descriptive material such as background.)
... lost? (If there were many contestants, you don’t have to name each one, but you should indicate how many there were.
If the decision came down to a final few, all of those who came close should be mentioned.)
... made the decision? (In contests, who were the judges? In elections, how many people voted?)
What ...
... was won? (What was the title? What was the prize for winning?)
... was the margin of victory?
When ...
... was the decision final? (For most stories, only the day is needed. In tight elections, knowing that the outcome wasn’t
known for hours after could be interesting.)
Where ...
... was the contest? (As with speeches, specific locations usually aren’t important.)
Why ...
... did the winner win? (In other words, what were the winner’s strengths or the loser’s weaknesses?)
How ...
... was the decision made? (Most elections, of course, are decided by votes. But as we learned in 2016, you can win most
of the votes and still lose the U.S. presidential election.)
Lede
Your primary job when you write about the results of a contest: tell the audience who won what.
Whatever else your first paragraph includes, it almost always must include that information.
As with any lede, you have to decide whether to name the “who” or just describe her, based on familiarity to your au-
dience. In most election stories, the candidates should already be known to the audience because of previous reporting. In
many contests, however, you many instead choose to use a description, such as “a senior journalism major.”
If you do use a description, choose one that adds the most news value to your story. If you write about a literary contest,
the winner’s class year and major may be less interesting than her first language is Chinese, not English.
Many election and contest ledes will add another angle -- something about the event or the outcome that taps into a dif-
ferent news value. Examples:
• Rob Chmura defeated Edward Albee to become president of the Undergraduate Student Government on
Tuesday, in an election that drew less than 5 percent of eligible voters.
• A sophomore engineering student, who only entered the Mr. Flash contest because he was bored while
waiting for his friends to join him at Ray’s Place, went home with the title Wednesday.
Next paragraphs
The second graf should support the lede. Unlike the speech story, the second graf of a contest story doesn’t have to be a
direct quote -- but it can be. Like the speech story, if the lede doesn’t name the winner, the second graf should.
By the third paragraph, any other key questions should be answered. That includes the nature of the contest, if it’s not
obvious or familiar to the audience. The Mr. Flash pageant is relatively new, for example, so the campus audience may not
be clear about its purpose or how the decisions are made; those things should be explained high in the story.
Rest of the story
The order of information in the rest of the story depends on news values; at this point, a contest story becomes much the
same as any inverted pyramid. Information you may want to include:
• Comments from the winner and perhaps some losers. If these people have interesting quotes, they may go high
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 in the story. But if their statements are the same boring things you’ve heard a thousand times, don’t risk losing your
audience’s interest. Bury the quotes at the bottom of the story -- and paraphrase them if they’re very boring.
• Details of the contest. The Mr. Flash pageant has five elements -- men’s formal wear, celebrity impersonations,
swimwear, talent and questions. You may want to use highlights of those in your story.
Again, use your news judgment. If a particular element -- say, formal wear -- wasn’t interesting and didn’t contribute
significantly to the results, you don’t need to describe it. Nor do you need to list the elements in the order they were
presented on stage. As with a speech, you get to rearrange them in order of interest. Your job is not to transcribe, but
to be selective.
• Background of the winner. Even in an election story where the candidates are famous, the winner deserves more
than the mention of her name. Where this goes in the story depends on factors such as how unusual that background is
in the context of the event (a political newcomer’s background is more newsworthy than that of a veteran politician).
• Comments from others. The contestants or candidates should be the focus of your story. However, others may have
worthwhile, interesting things to say. Just be sure the comments you use have both those characteristics. A judge’s
comments explaining why someone won may qualify, if they provide detail. A random spectator’s simple statement of
pleasure to have seen the contest? No one cares. Trust me: No one cares.

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Other events

If something unexpected happens on campus -- say, a fire breaks out in a classroom building -- most students won’t be
at the scene, so they’ll naturally be curious about what happened. They might want every detail, and want to know how it
happened step by step.
But when an event is a planned one -- a formal dance, a career expo, a community fair -- your potential audience consists
of two groups: students who were there and know what happened already, and students who chose not to be there and prob-
ably don’t care much about what happened. That explains why you have to think carefully about how you write after-the-
event stories.
In the previous sections, we covered two special kinds of events. The same general principles apply to any after-the-
event story. The biggest one: Don’t bore the reader. It is so important that you avoid boring the reader, in fact, that the first
question you should ask yourself as you sit down to write is not one of the 5 W’s but: Is this worth a story at all?
The mere fact that a scheduled event happened is not worth a story.
Sometimes, you’ll know heading into an event that news will happen: The speaker will have something to say; a winner
will be selected. The details of what the speaker said or the identity of the winner could not have been known in advance
(presumably), so you have something to tell your readers that they don’t already know.
Even with those stories, though, you can’t take reader interest for granted. If there’s a putting contest in downtown Kent,
not on campus, and the winner is someone not connected to the university, why would Stater readers care who won?
What if you’re covering a sorority raising money for charity by sponsoring a walkathon? There will be no winners; you
know going into the event that you won’t be able to passively observe the event and still come away with a story, as you can
with a speech or a contest.
Instead, you can take one of these approaches, arranged roughly in order of difficulty.
Outcome
Was the event a success or a failure? To write this story, you first have to figure out what the measure of that should be.
Just asking an organizer for a general response won’t be enough. Organizers will always say their events are successes. Nor
can you rely on your own gut instincts. I saw a rally for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign in Ann Arbor, Michi-
gan. The crowd looked big (to me) and sounded enthusiastic. Mondale won only one state and the District of Columbia that
year, and he lost Michigan by a 3-2 margin.
You need some specific measure. Is it a charity event? How much money was raised? The plain figure won’t tell you
enough to make a judgment, either. You should have asked the organizers in advance how much they expected to raise. You
should have checked on how much was raised in previous years, or at similar events hosted by other groups. Even events
without monetary goals can be judged. How many people attended? Is that number higher or lower than in the past?
If you’ve done research in advance, you can write a lede like this:
• A near-record crowd descended on Ravenna this weekend for the 34th Annual Ravenna Balloon-a-Fair.
Telling your readers it was almost a record puts the attendance in context, suggesting the fair was a success. Here’s an
example of what happens when you provide a number but not context:
• Bad: More than 250 participants attended the third annual Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathe-
matics (STEM) Project Fair on Saturday in the Student Center Ballroom.
Because 250 people in one place isn’t an overwhelming number, readers can’t judge whether this is a good thing or a bad
thing. The size of the crowd is there, but without context this lede is no better than saying “The third annual STEM Project
Fair was held Saturday.”
Reporting opportunity
To write an outcome story, you probably can get the key facts from an event organizer. You may want other interviews to
add depth, but the heart of your article will be one interview. The next category adds a degree of difficulty by forcing you to
build the core of your article on several interviews.
The basic idea: Don’t focus on the event; use the event as an opportunity to interview several people in one place at one
time.
You’re covering a career expo. You might be able to write an outcome story based on the number of students attending
or the number of companies exhibiting. What if neither of those numbers is significantly changed? One answer is to decide

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there’s no story. Another, though, is to go into the event with a plan that doesn’t depend on the event itself generating news.
Who will be at the expo? Recruiters and students who want to be recruited. What stories might need just those types of
sources? Maybe an advice story: How to get over your fear of job interviews. Ask students what makes them nervous, or
what they don’t understand about interviewing. Ask the recruiters what they look for in interviews, or what they think appli-
cants should know. Ask both groups for funny or telling stories about interviews that went spectacularly wrong or right.
Images
Every year, downtown Kent becomes one big party on a Saturday around Halloween. Individual bars or restaurants may
have costume contests; groups of students or visitors may have their own informal drinking contests. But that’s not the
point.
The whole thing isn’t organized, so any crowd numbers you get will be wild guesses; you can’t make a fair comparison
to past years. You could count the number of arrests -- and some years, that might be newsy -- but a few disorderly conducts
more or less won’t mean much.
Still, it’s a major event filled with wacky sights and sounds. You can make a story based on presenting those sights,
sounds (and even smells), with passages such as this:
• Santa Claus in a red onesie strode down Water Street, passing half a dozen individuals wearing Guy
Fawkes masks. A masked clown leaned out a window above Old City Bank, greeting passersby who
glanced up toward him.
Image stories have to pass three hurdles.
First, the event has to generate enough interesting items to carry most of the story. “Interesting” here means either out of
the ordinary or unique to a particular event. Santa Claus in a red onesie walking past a bunch of Guy Fawkes impersonators
hits on both counts. “Red and blue balloons bobbed from children’s hands” could apply to any one of a million community
events.
Second, you have to find these items. You will have to roam the event for a long time, paying close attention to every-
thing around you, taking notes and names. Passive observing won’t be enough. You’ll want quotes to add to the picture, like
this passage:
• Tina and Vince Sferra parked on one of the benches on the corner of Erie and South Water Street, taking
in the costumed sights throughout the evening. Vince, 49, a lifelong Kent resident, said he’s been to nearly
all the town’s Saturday night Halloweens.
“All these park benches around here are full of the older generation because we all just sit and observe:
dinner and the shows, so to speak,” Tina said.
Vince said Kent’s Halloween isn’t what it used to be.
“Times have changed,” he said. “It’s gotten a lot crazier. Kids here can get pretty wild and extreme, but I
guess were were like that once.”
Third, you’ll have to turn your notes into a complete, captivating picture of the event. You’d better have many more
items in your notes than you put in your story; image stories require throwing out a lot of dross while selecting the most
golden moments. And you’ll need to be at your most creative, using strong verbs and precise descriptions.
Anecdotes
An anecdote is a very short story. This is about the bare minimum to qualify as an anecdote:
• Members of H20 Church cooked and served up free, fresh and piping-hot pancakes. One bar hopper walk-
ing by asked the group, “You going to give a religious spiel?”
“We don’t give a religious spiel unless you ask for one,” an H20 member replied, giving the man a stack.
Something happens. Two people talk to each other, as opposed to talking to the reporter. There’s some meaning that can
be read into their words about the attitudes of the bar hopper and the church folks.
Many anecdotes will be slightly longer and have more detail. A story based on anecdotes requires everything an image
story does, but moreso. You have to roam and pay attention, but you also have to stop and wait for scenes to develop. You
probably won’t be lucky enough to stumble across enough good scenes, or see them from beginning to end, so you’ll have
to do more reporting. When you catch part of a scene, you’ll interview the participants, any maybe spectators as well, about
what happened and why. You’ll interview others at random to ask if they saw or heard something unusual; then you’ll press
them for details and seek verification.
Anecdote stories face the same hurdles as image stories, but higher. You may get away with one dull sentence of descrip-
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tion in a string of images, but one dull anecdote will spread over several paragraphs and kill audience interest. Writing a
string of anecdotes is a rigorous test of your storytelling ability -- what to leave in and what to leave out, how to set up a
punch line.
When done right, image or anecdote stories, or combinations of the two approaches, make the readers feel as if they were
standing beside the reporters, taking it all in. But reporters know that the picture they’re painting is impressionistic, not pho-
torealism. They’re choosing iconic images and rich anecdotes, like giving readers a two-minute highlight film from a three-
hour football game.
That’s why the best of these stories rely on fielding an army of reporters to bring back a mountain of moments. When a
major steelmaker closed in Cleveland, The Plain Dealer sent about a dozen reporters to the plant and the surrounding neigh-
borhood. One of the moments they came back with was a guy pushing a shopping cart through the mill. The final decision
to close the mill had come down so suddenly that the company wasn’t prepared, and the shopping cart was filled with layoff
notices the guy was distributing. The mill was vast; one reporter could never have covered it all, and might have missed the
cart. But with an army, someone spotted it and found out what was happening, and another reporter verified the background
with the company. That single image -- one not captured on film -- is something many readers still remember.
Through the eyes
Perhaps you’ve had this experience: You’re showing someone from out of town around your city or campus, and that
person oohs and aahs at objects you take for granted, or pulls you along to museums you haven’t been inside since grade
school field trips, or gushes over a Polish boy sandwich as if it were an unusual concoction.
To you, your hometown or campus is dull. You’ve seen it all; you’re there every day. But to the eyes of your visitor, ev-
erything is new. Watching their reactions makes you look at your own surroundings in a different way.
What if you could use that phenomenon to make a story out of an event? What if you could let your audience see it
through a new set of eyes?
You can. But it’s hard.
Imagine a local pet shelter has an open house to encourage adoptions. The place has balloons and grilled hot dogs; peo-
ple walk past the cages and kennels. A couple people adopt dogs. Worth a story? If that’s all you’ve got, then: no.
But imagine seeing that same event through the eyes of a child, particularly a child who has wished for a puppy for a
year and doesn’t know his parents have finally decided to give in to his pleas. See him getting out of the car, his eyes light-
ing up when he sees the animals, but being pulled away first to get a balloon and a frankfurter (his parents have a slight
sadistic streak). See him playing with dogs that already have owners, brought back to the shelter for a kind of reunion. See
him tugging at his parents’ hands, drawing them faux-reluctantly into the shelter. Walking down the rows, stopping here and
there. He wavers between two puppies a few cages apart before settling on the ginger one. Now his parents say they have to
go. The child looks up at them, his eyes beginning to fill with tears.
“We have to go to the front desk to fill out the papers so we can bring your puppy home,” his mom says quickly.
You can take it from there, right? Writing a “through the eyes” story is the easiest part. A straight chronological structure
works: first this happened, then that.
The reporting take some effort, making notes on what’s happening in front of you and interviewing the people afterward
to fill in what they were thinking.
The hardest part, though, is finding that set of eyes. How do you find a set of parents who a) have such a plan, and b) are
willing to let you tag along? Do you find them in advance, or take your chances on spotting a likely couple at the event?
What if you follow a child all the way and he ends up not liking any of the puppies, or he throws a tantrum before they get
to the cages and his parents give up and take him home?
The obstacles are so daunting that you don’t see many reporters taking the dare. But if you have the guts, and if you’re
willing to face the possibility that in the end you’ll have nothing to show for all your work, the payoff can be big. Look
around campus. High school students come here to test out prospective colleges. How does Kent State look to one of them?
Students from China and other countries are getting their first looks at America. What does one of them make of a Cleve-
land Indians game? What does Greek Rush Week look like from the perspective of a homeschooled freshman?
Lede
No formula can tell you how to write a lede when there are so many different directions the story can take. One general
tip: Start with your best material.
Don’t hold your most interesting image or most telling anecdote for the middle of the story. As journalists, you’re never
promised an audience that will read your stories to the end.
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 Every rule has exceptions. If you’re writing through the eyes of someone else, you probably want to use a chronological
approach, telling the story from start to finish. The payoff of the puppy story wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if the reader
knew throughout that the kid was going to get a schnauzer.
Still, you should think hard before deciding. Even with stories structured chronologically, there is a technique (which
we’ll discuss in more depth later in the book) called “in medias res” -- starting “in the middle of things.” You might start
that puppy story just before the payoff, with the child’s eyes brimming with tears. Before you get to the mom’s response,
you cut to the beginning of the story. You’ve told the reader there’s going to be a big emotional moment, but not how you’ll
get there or what happens next.
Rest of the story
Again, each of these approaches plays out in its own way as you move on from the lede. But, again, one general tip:
Don’t forget the event.
Somewhere -- somewhere near the top -- you have to provide the 5 W’s. What was the event? When? Where? Who spon-
sored it? Why was it held? This may seem like obvious advice, but it’s easy to get caught up in stringing images together
and forget to tell your audience what day all that stuff happened.

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Obituaries

People die. Sometimes those deaths generate news stories about the impact of the death -- the need to find a new provost,
therapy given to grieving classmates. Sometimes the news stories concern the manner of death -- a shooting, a car accident,
a public suicide. Other stories are not about how the people died, but instead about how they lived. Those stories are called
obituaries.
At one time, newspapers, especially smaller papers, tried to write obituaries about every death in town. To manage the
volume, they wrote most of them following a rigid format, relying on undertakers to get the required information from the
family and pass it on to the reporter. The legacy of those strict formulas is reflected in lists of required elements, such as
details of funeral arrangements.
As newspapers became more selective in assigning obits, they also raised the bar on content. Reporters were told to go
beyond bare mention of club memberships and surviving family. Obituaries celebrated what made each person unique. That
produced stories like these, written by (now professor) Mitch McKenney:
• Willie C. Covington, a disc jockey who once kept a suicidal caller on the air until help could reach him, died
Tuesday at St. Mary’s Hospital.
• With nearly four decades in the Downtown Lions Club and three terms as its president, Ben Wolfson
earned the life membership Lions International gave him in 1991.
Days before his death of a heart attack at home Monday in Century Village, Mr. Wolfson, 84, had finished
copying and mailing the club’s newsletter.
“He devoted 39 years to the Lions,” said club Secretary-Treasurer Phil Wocker. “By God, he worked right
up to the end.”
To write obits like those, you must consider three sets of 5 W’s.
Basic info
Who ...
... died?
... are the surviving family?
... in the family died earlier (This could cover parents, spouses, siblings or children. How many of those you include may
vary based on factors such as the deceased’s age.)
What ...
... did the person do for a living?
... clubs, churches or other organizations did the person belong to? (Always ask about military service)
When ...
... was the person born?
... did the person die?
Where ...
... was the person born?
... did the person live?
... did the person die (if it’s the same city as where the person lived, this might be the specific location, such as a hospi-
tal)?
Why ...
... did the person die (that is, what was the cause of death)?
Funeral info
What ...
... services are planned (visiting hours, Mass, burial, etc.)?
... recommendations are given for donations?
When ...

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 ... are those services scheduled?
Where ...
... will they be held?
Life story
Who ...
... were the most important people in the deceased’s life?
What ...
... will the person be most remembered for?
... were the most significant events in the person’s life?
... were the person’s favorite things (hobbies, for example)?
When ...
... did these important events happen? At what point in the person’s life?
Where ...
... did they happen?
The first two sets of W’s must be in every obituary. The “life story” questions are examples of the types of questions
you’ll ask. Which of those things make it into the story depend on what’s most interesting.
For many reporters, reporting an obituary seems like prying, peppering people with questions while they’re deep in
mourning. It does require sensitivity. “Hey, I hear your old man’s dead. Got any good stories about him?” is not a great way
to open a conversation with a surviving daughter. However, most people appreciate the idea that their loved one’s life will
be celebrated publicly. They’re often glad to help you.
Where do you start? Often, the funeral home, for two reasons. One, some jerks like to call newspapers and request obits
for people who aren’t really dead; funeral directors don’t joke about things like that. Second, the funeral home has already
had contact with the family and knows who’s taking charge of the arrangements. If someone is steady enough to do that,
they’re the best person to start your interviews with.
Yes, interviews -- plural. Obituaries, like any other stories, are best if you have multiple sources and gather much more
information than you’ll put in the story. Exactly who you talk to depends in part on what the deceased did and how famous
they were, but likely choices include family members, employers, co-workers and leaders of clubs or churches.
Alana Baranick, an award-winning obituary writer for The Plain Dealer, left behind a free online guide, available through
the Poynter website (free with registration). Some of her top tips:
Look for gaps. The summary of life events you get from the funeral home or a family member may focus on just a few
things. For example, a son may talk only about his mother’s last five years, battling cancer. Ask, gently, what she was like
before that.
Get specifics. As is the case with any interview, you have to be on alert for potentially interesting facts or anecdotes.
When you recognize them, pile on questions so you can tell a vibrant story.
Some of your questions will clearly ask for interesting things: “What’s the first thing you think of when you remember
growing up with your twin brother?” But people, even in the best of times, aren’t always the best judges of what’s interest-
ing. Often, they will consciously skip over details that they think are too common or dull, but it’s the details that make each
person unique. Alana wrote:
• If the deceased “retired from the automobile plant,” what automaker did she work for and for how long?
Which plant? When did she retire? Did she paint the car chassies, type requisitions for parts or manage the
plant? If the dearly departed “worked in the food service industry,” did he wait tables? Did he fill vending
machines with candy and potato chips? Did he manage a steak house or run a chain of delicatessens?
Make your own choices. Alana again:
• Saying that someone, who was past retirement age, belonged to the American Association of Retired Per-
sons does not enhance that person’s obituary. The same principle applies to various professional member-
ships. We expect lawyers to be members of bar associations, physicians to belong to medical organiza-
tions and engineers to be affiliated with engineering societies. ... If the deceased had served as president
of a particular professional group, we might mention it, because that generally shows a high level of com-
mitment.
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Lede
The most commonly used lede for obituaries follows this formula:
of (cause).
(Name), (interesting fact), died (day) or
at (location).
Sometimes one other fact is added, as in this example from McKenney:
• William H. Tylander, who ran the former Tylander’s lumber yards in West Palm Beach and Fort Pierce, died
Monday of heart failure. He was 85.
Even when the lede is different (usually that means a short anecdote), a paragraph just like that one should appear very
high in the story. Here’s how Leila Atassi of [Link] wrote about her former co-worker.
• Award-winning Plain Dealer obituary writer Alana Baranick once guiltily confessed that while normal Amer-
icans spend the weeks before Christmas buying gifts for their loved ones, she spent her time “hoping and
thinking and praying” for the ironic death of a department-store Santa, a toymaker or a Christmas tree
farmer.
“The dark side of my fixation is that these subjects, whose stories are so much fun to share at such appro-
priate times, have to be dead,” Baranick wrote in a 2005 blog entry -- adding that a local “elf” had just suf-
fered a fatal heart attack en route to his elf gig. “I do feel guilty when I get what I wish for.”
Baranick -- who, for decades, captured the ironies and humor in the stories of ordinary people and brought
the dead to life for an extra day -- died Friday at a hospice facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after a brief
battle with cancer. She was 65.
Note one key difference from the basic summary lede: In an obituary, it doesn’t matter whether the person was famous or
not. Every obit has the person’s name in the lede.
Middle of the story
Since an obit is a little biography, the natural structure is chronological. How big a slice of time that includes depends on
the person and the space available. Earlier in this section, you read the lede of an obit for Willie C. Covington, a DJ “who
once kept a suicidal caller on the air until help could reach him.” The second paragraph of that story was a short extension
of the lede, saying he died from complications of AIDS. The middle of the story picked up the lede’s key fact:
• He was the overnight disc jockey on WPOM-AM (1600) in 1990 when a man called saying he wanted to
shoot himself. So Mr. Covington - nicknamed C.C. in 3-D - put the man on the air and let him talk for 2 1/2
hours, long enough for Riviera Beach police officers to find him standing at a pay phone.
“I had a lot of respect for him,” WPOM general manager Ronald Leonard said. “Anyone who can talk some-
one out of that - that’s doing something.”
Covington left the station about a year ago but continued to play music at clubs and parties. His sister The-
resa Perry said he kept in touch with the man who wanted to kill himself.
“Not long before the end, he said he wanted to check on that man one more time and make sure he was
going to be OK,” Perry said.
In that example, you see the two types of quotes most common in obits: direct descriptions (“I had a lot of respect for
him”) and illustrative statements (“Not long before the end, he said he wanted to check on that man one more time.”). Don’t
be afraid of funny quotes in an obituary, as long as they reveal something about the deceased:
• Zack Baranick described an eccentric, loveable mom, who would support him and his younger brother Mi-
chael in any undertaking, no matter how odd.
“She would do anything for you,” Baranick said. “We had a joke that I could tell mom that I wanted to be
Satanist, and she would go out and buy me a goat.”
Bottom of the story
What happened in a person’s life is almost always what’s most interesting in an obituary. That’s why it starts the story
and forms the middle. But there is other information that’s important for a select group of readers -- those who knew the
person. You have to list things such as club memberships that might jog the memory of those who aren’t sure if the de-
ceased was the same John Smith they knew. You have to provide details of the funeral arrangements so they know where
and when to go. Those go at the bottom of the obit, in basic sentences:

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• In addition to his sister, Mr. Covington is survived by 11 children; his mother and stepfather, Minnie and
George Anderson of Riviera Beach; a brother, Franklin Bryant of Augusta, Georgia; and another sister, Di-
ane Hallman of Starkville, Mississippi.
His funeral will be at 2 p.m. Saturday at St. John Missionary Baptist Church, 2006 A.E. Isaacs Ave., West
Palm Beach.

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