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The hourglass structure is one such device. A story shape that journalists can employ when they have news to report and a story to tell. Earlier this week, I listened to Christine Martin, dean of West Virginia’s Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, describe the form to Poynter’s summer fellows as a useful tool for reporters searching for a form.The best stories often create their own shape; writers consider their material, determine what they want the story to say, and then decide on the best way to say it.But journalists, like all writers, sometimes rely on tried-and-true forms and formulas: the inverted pyramid, the “five boxes” approach, the nut graf story. You need to be familiar with these forms whether or not you decide to write your story in a completely new way.“Formulaic writing has gotten a bad name,” says Poynter Online Editor Bill Mitchell, a veteran reporter and editor. “Done right, it diverts creatively from formula in ways that serve the needs of the story at hand. Tying the reporting, as well as the writing, to the form lends a discipline and focus that produce better stories.”The hourglass was named by my colleague Roy Peter Clark in 1983 after he had begun to notice something new in his morning paper.Clark was a likely discoverer. A college English literature professor-turned-newspaper writing coach and reporter, he used his skills as a literary scholar and his experience in the newsroom to deconstruct the form.In an article published in the Washington Journalism Review (since renamed American Journalism Review), he described this form and gave it a distinctive name: the hourglass. It provided an alternative, Clark said, “that respects traditional news values, considers the needs of the reader, takes advantage of narrative, and spurs the writer to new levels of reporting.”Clark said the hourglass story can be divided into three parts:Here you deliver the news in a summary lead, followed by three or four paragraphs that answer the reader’s most pressing questions. In the top you give the basic news, enough to satisfy a time-pressed reader. You report the story in its most concise form. If all that is read is the top, the reader is still informed. Because it’s limited to four to six paragraphs, the top of the story should contain only the most significant information.Here you signal the reader that a narrative, usually chronological, is beginning. Usually, the turn is a transitional phrase that contains attribution for the narrative that follows: according to police, eyewitnesses described the event this way, the shooting unfolded this way, law enforcement sources and neighbors agree.The hourglass can be used in all kinds of stories: crime, business, government, even to report meetings. It’s best suited, however, for dramatic stories that can be told in chronological fashion. In the right hands, as the following story from The Miami Herald illustrates, the hourglass is a virtuoso form that provides the news-conscious discipline of the inverted pyramid and the storytelling qualities of the classic narrative.
