Keeping the reader hooked

One of the first things I learned as a journalism student was that you only have three seconds to get a reader's attention and keep it.

When I first began as a journalism student, I thought that writing an amazing lead very well would be the hardest part. However, the more I wrote, the easier it got.  But as I began to read the news more and read it not only as a reader but also as a writer, I noticed that getting a reader's attention is not the hard part. The hard part is keeping reader's attention.

In Think Like An Editor, a book by Steve and Emilie Davis that is full of strategies to become a  good editor, Steve Davis shares an experience in one of the newsrooms he worked in. The staff invited readers to the office, gave them copies of the paper and told them to mark where they stop reading.  Davis said the results were brutal. 

Everyone gets bored with a story at a certain point. It's because we're busy people with busy lives, and we want to read something that's either a really good story or really informative.

One of the keys to writing informative and telling stories is to provide lots of context (background, research, statistics, etc.) and to include good descriptions of people and places, as well as good anecdotes and details.

Strategy 16 in Think Like An Editor offers way to help editors and reporters include more context in stories, such as using background, numbers and comparisons. One of the Strategy 16 assignments specifically helped me to think more about incorportating more details and information into a story:

Chose and enterprise story (or any other story) and look for ways to add context. What opportunities exist? What else is there to this story? What's missing?

Another important way to keep a reader's attention  is to use the Show, Don't Tell method. 

Journalists probably hear this all the time. I did, especially in my feature writing class. It was always Show, Don't Tell over and over and over again. But there's a reason I heard it so much.

It's because readers want to be there. Think about it. Why do you read a book (other than textbooks)? It's most likely because something about it appeals to you, or maybe you've read something by that author you liked before.  I think journalists should strive to have that same affect on readers. 

Of course, I can say all this as much as I want, but that doesn't make it easy. Including background, anecdotes, examples, details, etc. into a story is not always doable. And  for all we know, we could do ALL of that, and readers still would read passed the third or fourth graph.

I guess it's a toss up....