North Star

Mike Levine always talked, cracker crumbs falling out of his mouth, about writing a tease like you'd find in the idex of ESPN The Magazine as a way to define your theme, the one message you'd wrap each fact in your story around, like stripes on a barber's pole.



And you weren't finished reporting until you could define your story in a sentence -- like, This is a story about ...



Chip Scanlan addresses the same thing today on Poynter.org with an essay on finding the story's theme:



Defining the theme in one word is my favorite technique because one of the principal definitions of theme is "meaning in a word." Merged with the journalistic paradigm of five Ws and an H, that theme, or…