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 working hypothesis, can help you make the necessary decisions on the way to publication, from reporting and organizing to drafting and revising.

What's my story really about?

Who's the story about? Who are the major characters, the minor ones?

Where and when are the best places and times to find the story? What are the story's settings? What are the story's timelines? Often these elements lie outside a reporter's regular hours and location but they are vital to a story's power. You must go to them.

When should the story begin and end? And what to do about the mushy middle? What shape best supports the theme?

How did the story happen, unfold, come to be? What happened? What's the plot?

Why am I telling this story? Perhaps the most important question, one that readers, viewers and listeners are always wondering as they decide whether to continue or retreat from news stories: "Why does it matter?"