Breaking news can happen anytime, anywhere, and as a journalist, you need to be ready to update your story with the latest information. But how can you edit a news story for a breaking update without compromising your accuracy, clarity, and credibility? Here are some tips to help you revise your story for different media platforms.
Different media platforms have different audiences, expectations, and formats. For example, a print newspaper may have more space and time to provide background and context, while a radio broadcast may need to be concise and catchy. A website may allow for multimedia elements, such as photos, videos, or interactive charts, while a social media post may need to be engaging and shareable. Before you edit your story for a breaking update, consider who you are writing for, what they need to know, and how they prefer to consume the news.
Whichever, the medium you’re writing for, editing your story for a breaking update will require getting all the sides of the story, sieving them for facts, and lacing the story with backgrounders.
Print is an awkward breaking-news medium. TV, radio and digital are all much, much better. In the words of TV legend Bill O’Reilly: “F*ck it — We’ll do it live!”
“Know your audience.” This applies in the following way (as one example): Your audience is nuts for sports. A major trade/injury/signing has been announced. Break it everywhere: News and sports, alerts, wherever. Don’t just treat it as sports news. But you still have to exercise news judgment in the greyer cases, and judgment comes with experience.
A breaking update may add new facts, quotes, sources, or perspectives to your story, but it may also make some of your previous information obsolete, irrelevant, or inaccurate. You need to prioritize your information and decide what to keep, what to cut, and what to change. A good rule of thumb is to use the inverted pyramid structure, which places the most important and newsworthy information at the top of your story, and the less important and background information at the bottom. This way, you can ensure that your readers get the main points of your story, even if they don't read the whole thing.
I like covering major ongoing breaking news with a one-topic mini-blog. This allows the reader to see the newest information first, and speeds up the writer. Faster doesn’t mean allowing sloppiness or inaccuracies to infest your copy.
“A breaking update may add new facts, quotes, sources, or perspectives to your story, but it may also make some of your previous information obsolete, irrelevant, or invalid.” Depending on the gravity of the b/n, all of your earlier work may become irrelevant. Eg. “President John F Kennedy has apparently just been shot.” Who cares what happened before that? In five or 10 minutes, that lede will be the last sentence in your blog. First sentence? “Doctors pronounced President Kennedy dead about 30 minutes after the presumed shooting.” When the news stabilizes, you can write it in traditional news style.
Your headline and lead are the first things that your readers see, and they need to capture their attention and interest. A breaking update may require you to change your headline and lead to reflect the new information, angle, or tone of your story. For example, if your original headline was "Protesters march for climate action", and your breaking update was that the police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, you may want to change your headline to "Police clash with climate protesters". Similarly, you may want to update your lead to include the most relevant and compelling details of the update, such as the number of injuries, arrests, or casualties.
Your headlines speaks louder in every news reports. Employ adjectives that will make reader eager to read your news reports. This can be achieved through the use of attention grabbers.
Think Search Engine Optimization when writing headlines and ledes. Let the web do the work of promoting your story. I believe LinkedIn offers an SEO course, but it might not be free.
A breaking update may come from a variety of sources, such as official statements, eyewitness accounts, social media posts, or other media outlets. You need to check the credibility and reliability of your sources and facts before you include them in your story. You can do this by verifying the identity and expertise of your sources, cross-checking the information with other sources, and using reputable and trustworthy sources. You should also attribute your sources and facts to show where you got them from, and use direct quotes or paraphrases to avoid misinterpretation or distortion.
Much of what passes for breaking international news, for a variety of reasons, are journalists not being in the field, but writing off television or wire feeds. This cost the New York Times some credibility when it reported that Israeli warplanes struck Al-Ahli hospital in North Gaza on Oct 17. The next step was to posit that a Palestinian rocket crashed into the hospital's parking lot, where they detonated, killing many people. But this occurred at night in Gaza, and the resolution wasn't great on the video. After more about a week of review, the NYT wrote on Nov 25: "The Times’s finding does not answer what actually did cause the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital blast, or who is responsible." Fact-checking a war is a serious and complex business.
A breaking update may affect the language and style of your story, such as the tone, voice, tense, or word choice. You need to edit your language and style to make sure that your story is clear, consistent, and coherent. You can do this by using active voice, simple sentences, and precise words, avoiding jargon, slang, or bias, and using transitions and connectors to link your paragraphs and sentences. You should also proofread your story for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and formatting errors, and use a style guide to follow the rules and conventions of your media platform.
A breaking update may also require you to review your multimedia elements, such as photos, videos, audio, or graphics, that accompany your story. You need to make sure that your multimedia elements are relevant, accurate, and ethical, and that they complement and enhance your story. You can do this by choosing multimedia elements that illustrate or explain the update, adding captions, titles, or credits to identify and contextualize them, and respecting the copyright, privacy, and consent of the people or places depicted in them.