For lot of us these days, our bandwidth to read news is near capacity. Often, it's not enough for a subject to be important. To keep a reader's attention, the story must build a compelling narrative, but breaking through to reach an audience in the first place means establishing the story's urgency, and news value, as early as possible. Which makes for a common dilemma: What to spill at the top of the story and what to save for later? Unlike so many of the literary tools that have clear applications in journalism, developing a plot that twists and arcs toward a dramatic crescendo is sometimes a hard thing to pull off in the news business when the big ending — the death, the bankruptcy, the scandal — has made headlines long before the reader lays eyes on your lede. Using examples from both fiction and non-fiction, including his own efforts in BuzzFeed stories about hate crimes and police brutality, Albert Samaha will explore this challenge and the structural tricks available to overcome it.
