Speaker 1: Hi everyone, my name is Julie Shapiro, I'm the Assistant Managing Editor for Enterprise at NBC News Digital. Welcome to NBCU Academy. Today we're going to be talking about the 101 on writing for digital. What you want to think about when you're writing for digital is that you have to grab the reader's attention and tell them what they need to know. So you want to be clear and concise and give them the information that they're looking for. Let's talk about the lead of a story, that's sometimes spelled L-E-D-E, and it's the very first sentence or two that the reader sees. It's really important to grab their attention with something that they are interested in finding out about. Let's look at an example of a hard news lead. This story is about when a person of interest was named in the New York City subway shooting. The lead here is fairly straightforward because what the reader needs to know is just the latest information. There's a person of interest, here's what happened in the story, and here's the person of interest's name. In a breaking news story like this, you want to keep the lead pretty short, straight to the point. You don't need a long windup, you want to just get right to what people need to know. Now let's look at an anecdotal lead. This is a story about a cold case that was solved, the murder of a woman. In this one, we don't start with the news that a cold case was solved. We start with the victim's sister. You don't know who she is at first, you just know that she has police at her door and they're coming to tell her something. Then you find out about what happened the last time they were here, when her sister was killed. Then you find out all the things that have happened to her since then, and you are really curious about what is going to be told to her this time when police come back. By the time you get to the news that the cold case is solved, you already care about her and are curious what's going to happen next. Next up after your lead is the nut graph. They call it that because it's the nut or the heart of the story, the most important part of what the story is about. This is where you will always have your who, what, when, where, why, and how. You might have some context explaining why this is important and why we're telling you this story right now. In this case, we started with an anecdotal lead about an educator who had left his job, and then the question is, why are we telling you this story? We say, he's one of a small but growing number of educators this has happened to. Why is it happening? It's these battles over the teaching of what some are terming critical race theory. Then you need to explain to a reader, what is that, right? Why is that happening? And then we go into, what's the bigger context? Lawmakers in 22 states have proposed limits on how schools talk about critical race theory, or even just race and education generally. The nut graph also depends on the audience you're writing for. If you're writing for a local audience, you may know that they're interested in a particular school or a particular issue just because they live in the community, and you just need to explain why it's significant to that community. If you're writing for a national audience, you may need to explain why the issue is significant nationally. Is it happening in more than one place? Is it the most extreme example of something in the country? Is it the first example of something in the country? That type of information goes in the nut graph. Now that you have your lead and nut graph done, in some ways the hardest part is over. You just need to fill in the rest of the story, details and quotes. Let's talk about quotes. They're really important for a story to feel urgent and important and to get to know characters, but you don't want to use too many of them. So if you can say something better in your own words and paraphrase, do that. Save the quotes for moments that are emotional and impactful. When you're looking for quotes, a good quote does more than just convey information. It conveys emotion. It conveys detail. It helps you understand a person and understand the story. Next up, you want to add more details to the story. These expand on the points that you made in the nut graph. There could be examples. There could be historical context, but you don't want to add too much detail because the reader could lose interest, so you want to be selective about what you include. Let's go back to the example about educators leaving their jobs. In this story, we started with one example, but we wanted to show that it wasn't just one example. It was happening all over the country. So we added in examples from Texas and from Missouri, but we didn't put in five paragraphs about each one. We decided to do it just in a sentence. In the Missouri case, the most interesting detail that we wanted to make sure the reader heard was that the district had to hire private security to patrol this person's house because that's how dangerous the situation had gotten. So how do you end a piece? Let's talk about the kicker. The kicker is ideally something that's memorable and gives the reader a takeaway. In a breaking news story, sometimes you just get to the end of the information and end, but in another type of story, you want to leave the reader with something memorable. So in this example, we have a story about a water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. In this case, we're ending with one of our activist characters from the story, and we're also ending with something forward-looking. So it's a quote about what might happen next, and she's saying, we know the next time it will be worse. The role of journalism is to inform people, to expose things that need to come to light, and to help people make decisions. It's important for people to be able to read your story, know what you're saying, and get information out of it. So with these tips, you too will be writing like a pro for a website.