L - Localizing the Story

By: Rich Cameron

Posted: 5/15/08

One of the news elements that makes stories newsworthy --that news peg again-- is localness. Something that happens locally or involves a local person is more likely to be newsworthy for a local publication.

Seek the local angle --if there is one-- in your stories.

Today's lesson involves the facts from Workbook Exercise 4.2. Here we have a story about a convention that happened in New Orleans. So what? Why put it in our paper? We are interested in it because of the local person. So let's put him in the lead. And since we have a number of identifiers for him, we'll use either a blind lead or a delayed identification lead.

But which would be preferable? There are a number of factors that would help us. Perhaps the most important is to think about the delayed identification lead. If we were to merely put the person's name in the lead, would readers recognize the name enough to be interested in reading the next paragraph? Sometimes that doesn't matter, but it is a good test to start with.

But before we start, what is the story about and what are the elements we're going to have to deal with.

The story is about a local person who has been elected president of a national trade organization. The blind/delayed ID elements are:

Charles Appleman/owner of a local bookstore
(We have other descriptions of him, such as member of a local school board, but those descriptions are not what got him elected.)
Mid-State Independent Booksellers Association/an association of 2,000 members that holds an annual trade show and watches legislation.

If this were a press release, it likely would have a dateline on it. The dateline today is a word or two, usually in all caps, that indicates the place of origin of the story. In earlier days when news was not transmitted around the world quite as fast as it is today, the dateline also included the date the story originated. When you localize such a story, however, you remove the dateline.

This time, since Appleman is a local school board member and local business owner who might well be recognized by a number of our readers, we will start with a delayed identification lead.

Charles Appleman was elected as president of the Mid-State Independent Booksellers Association in New Orleans last week.

If we had gone with a blind lead, it might look like this:

The owner of a local bookstore has been elected president of the Mid-State Independent Booksellers Association.

or

The owner of a local bookstore has been elected president of a national booksellers organization.

Remember, while the focus is on the man elected, we've got the other blind/delayed ID element, and it can be split either way. Also note that we can complete that blind/delayed ID obligation in the third paragraph if the second starts to get cluttered.

Back to our delayed ID version:

The owner of a local bookstore has been elected president of the Mid-State Independent Booksellers Association.

Charles Appleman has been active in the organization for the last 10 years and served last year as its vice president. He was elected at the association's annual convention in New Orleans.

I don't want to use "Thursday and Friday," because I don't know exactly which day he was elected.

The association has about 2,000 members in 50 states and holds an annual trade show and watches legislation that may affect book publishers and booksellers. About 1,000 members were at last week's convention.

That last paragraph is about as long as you want to get, so you might want to save the second sentence for later in the story.

The owner of Appleman Books on New York Avenue will serve as president for one year. In addition to this position, he also serves as a San Ricardo school board member.

© Copyright 2010 Journalism Program