Know how to tell stories in all formats

Want inspiration for the storytelling you’ll be doing at the journalism school – whether in print, broadcast or multimedia? Your daily diet of news media should give you plenty of great content to peruse. But if you’d like an extra dose of top-flight storytelling, it pays to scour the landscape for model work to dissect.

There are numerous repositories for such exemplary journalism. Web sites for the myriad awards contests are the obvious place to start. In addition to the highest-profile contests mentioned in tip No. 8 from our Getting off to a Fast Start at the CUNY J-School blog post (such as the Pulitzer Prizes, DuPonts, Peabodys and Online Journalism Awards), there are many, many others.

For instance, Investigative Reporters and Editors celebrates the best in investigative journalism with its annual IRE awards, which also honor the best work in various media, like newspapers and magazines, television and radio, online and books. You can also peruse the winners of the highly coveted George Polk Awards for a menu of great journalism — whether it be foreign, national, state or local reporting, beat reporting from business, sports and environment pages, or media like magazine or television.

National Press Club Awards go to a wide range of categories, as does the Society of Professional Journalists with its Sigma Delta Chi awards, which go back decades, with more than three dozen categories of prizes. The Radio Television Digital News Association also gives its Edward R. Murrow Awards for electronic journalism, as well as its RTNDA/Unity Awards for covering cultural diversity.

As you look through these prizewinners for inspiration, trying picking out one piece for a second read or viewing, and consider the work with the x-ray eyes of a journalist. How is the lede crafted? How strongly does the piece close? What key point does the piece make and where? What’s the overall structure of the piece? And when and how does the journalist introduce critical pieces of information, new characters or color details? You might also think about how you would approach this same topic, or check similar coverage to see how other news organizations handled this story or stories like it. And remember, nothing’s ever perfect – consider what about the piece you think could have been done better.

If you want more exemplary work from a specific medium, you can go beyond awards sites to find it. Particularly for interactive storytelling, get some great examples at sites like InteractiveNarratives.org. The site allows users to rate and comment on entries, so you can see what colleagues in the profession think about various story approaches. Meanwhile, Cyberjournalist.net’s Great Work galleries offers the best of breaking news and enterprise work, as well as multimedia, Flash and interactive stories, blogs, community journalism, student work ad award winners. The award-winning multimedia work at MediaStorm is always worth keeping up on, as is the New York Times‘ Multimedia/Photos page and its Lens photojournalism blog, and the Washington Post‘s Multimedia page. 

If after all of your explorations, you’re even more confused about which medium is best to tell your particular story, here are a few useful guides. The Knight Digital Media Center has a tutorial on picking the right media for reporting a story, digital media educator Mindy McAdams has a useful blog post on how to tell a good story with images and sound, while the Mastering Multimedia blog has suggestions on how to best approach a video story.

Don’t try to consume all these awards sites at once, but make it a general practice to view them regularly over time and use bookmarking tools to collect your favorite examples of the best of the best. Return to them repeatedly for ideas and inspiration, and perhaps your own work will one day serve as a guidepost for other aspiring journalists.