From all the data you accumulate, from all the interviews you conduct, from all the documents you inspect, you should come up with one single, simple theme supported strongly by the data. Think of it as the skeleton on which everything else will hang or the classical music theme that will serve as the basis for all the variations. Everything in the story - the data, the interviews, the documents, the examples and anecdotes - will in some way relate to the theme, either by supporting it, expanding it, explaining its limitations or reacting to it.
Ensuring the story gets read
Write a lead that exemplifies the theme. If you're writing about a pattern of discrimination against minorities by a local hospital, don't begin with somebody who's the exception to the pattern. Instead, find the most interesting and dramatic case of discrimination you've got. The more you reduce the story to its essential elements, stripping away extraneous detail, the greater the impact on the readers. The more you begin with a story about people rather than numbers, the more likely you are to hook readers.
You should try to summarize your theme in a sentence or at most a lead paragraph. Think of it as the hard news lead you would write if you chose not to begin with an anecdote.
Keep it simple
You spent three weeks on the story, interviewed 50 people, examined 212 documents and put 6,000 records into a FoxPro database. You used a Pentium 200 with 64 megs of RAM to crunch the data. That's impressive and important, but why should the reader care? Don't let it get in the way of telling the story.
Story elements
Why do people read 500-page novels but complain they don't have time to read newspaper stories? Often, we try to give readers stories that are long on detail but short on compelling narrative that drives people through to the end. Narratives people reading by introducing believable characters and describing what happens to them over time. The best stories of this type have a beginning, a middle and an end. Reporting these is tough. You need to nail down the details of the characters, the color, the dialogue that you might not gather in reporting a more traditional survey story. There's no excuse for embellishing the details or creating "composite" characters. But if you do the reporting painstakingly and craft the story carefully, there can be a big dividend in more readership.
Avoid large, uniform sections-chunks of data or extended interview segments - in the story, if possible. To keep readers interested, create a "rocky road" mix of anecdotes, key findings, data and quotes.
Protect your findings
Be conservative in interpreting the data. Try to imagine all the potential arguments that could be made against your central theme. Bounce it off experts. You may have to go back to the data to make sure your findings and methodology are bulletproof. Give prominent play to the point of view of those who can make substantial arguments against your central finding.
"Killer comparisons"
Strive for ways to derive statistical findings that can be stated fairly in the most concrete terms. In Newsday's series on racial discrimination in mortgage lending, an analysis of nearly 100,000 mortgage loans found that African-American applicants are rejected nearly three times as often as whites are. That was stated prominently. But the story went on to derive another point from the same data set in a powerful way: "The gap is so wide that a black applicant making more than $150,000 a year stands a greater chance of being rejected than does a white person making less than $35,000 a year."
Home to papa
Bring it back home at the end of the story. Explain what ultimately happened to the people you wrote about at the top. The last few grafs of a story can be the most powerful and can leave readers with a lasting impression.
Richard Galant can be reached at (516) 843-3274 or by e-mail at rgalant@newsday.com