Localizing brings a story home

By Dick Thien
Chips Quinn Writing Coach

How can you take advantage of national and international stories and create local stories for your newspaper?

The best thing any reporter, veteran or beginner, can do to localize a story is to read the front pages of the good newspapers on the Web, write down the point of their front-page stories and then analyze each with these questions:

What's happening relating to this in our city? (Or county, or state?)

What's happening with this disease at the local hospitals? Or doctors’ offices?

How is our nearest college or university handling this?

How is our town being protected from the same thing by our police department?

What do older citizens in our community have to say about this? Parents? School children? Others?

If it's an international story, try the university foreign-student office for student names (and for the names of professors who teach international issues).

Keep in mind that not every story will lend itself to this approach or produce a doable local version. But you need only one good idea a day to succeed in most newsrooms.

Do this every day. You will be amazed at how many of the resulting story ideas turn into dynamite reads.

About the column

Write It Right is updated regularly. Have a suggestion for a future column, contact Dick Thien.

Read Dick Thien's biography.

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