Journalists summarise the whole story in the first paragraph, and expand on the detail as they go along. So the most important and interesting stuff is at the top, and the fluff that is less useful or intriguing goes towards the end.
“The second paragraph? Who reads the second paragraph?”
There, I’ve gone and done it myself and now you don’t need to read the rest of this post. But wait… don’t go. There’s more you need to know first.
Until I decided to demonstrate this technique, with the first paragraph of this post, I was intending to start with a little reminiscence about a great movie from 1974 called The Front Page. It stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon as the editor and reporter in a 1920s Chicago newspaper.
At one point, Lemmon, the intrepid reporter, is filing copy about a notoriously dangerous criminal who has broken out of jail and stolen a gun. He’s on the loose, on the prison roof.
“Where’s the bit about the gun?”
Reading the copy, Matthau asks something along the lines of: “Where’s the bit about the gun?”
(I’m doing this from memory, as I don’t have a copy of the film to hand).
Lemmon replies: “It’s in the second paragraph.”
To which Matthau, the editor, says: “The second paragraph? Who reads the second paragraph?”
And it’s all there, in that one-liner - just about everything you need to know about writing in the newspaper style. It’s an education in journalism, all by itself.
