Who Is Your Audience?

    Years ago, I did time as a writing coach at the Sun-Sentinel* – where it was my job to help the newspaper’s editors and writers produce more interesting stories.
    Better I should have opened a fresh pork stand in downtown  Tel Aviv.
    Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about the two-legged products spawned by most journalism schools, it's that most of these well-meaning souls don’t know the difference between what is interesting and what is not.
     I remember, for example, asking the current City Editor of the Sun-Sentinel why – as the then County Government reporter -- she’d written an 16-inch story that was (a) totally irrelevant and (b) duller than yesterday’s business page shipping news in six point.
    “They'd budgeted a hole for it on 3-B,” she said – indignant that I’d even dared to ask.
    “But it doesn’t mean anything,’ I said.
    “I know,” she shrugged. “How do you think I felt having to write it?”
    Anyhow…
   Here’s a collection of questions I’d assembled during my Quixotic years as a writing coach – each one designed  to force journalists to think about what they are doing and why BEFORE they put fingers to keyboard:
   1.) Who is going to read your story?
   2.) What makes it interesting?
   3.)Is your story “good” news or “bad” news for your reader?
   4.) What will this story to and for your reader?
   5.) Does your reader NEED to know the facts in your story?
   6.) Did you enjoy producing this story?
   7.) Will your reader enjoy reading it – all the way to the end?
   8.) Will the material in your story make your reader’s life better or worse?

     *I left the Sun-Sentinel in 1998, having come to the dark epiphany that my life-long love of story-telling was as dead as Earl Maucker’s nuts – thanks to the bloodless world of corporate journalism with its politically correct control freaks and bonus mongers. 
      To experience the terminal status of Earl Maucker's dead nuts as a non-storytelling editor, click here:   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-EvahXc9uM