On Line Journalism

Chapter 7 - Hooking and Keeping Readers
- "so what?" is the what you have to ask yourself before writing, your piece needs to be interesting for the reader.
- Grab the readers attention, with the lead paragraph and bold your writing.
- Inverted pyramid is the technique used to arrange facts in a descending order from most important to least.
- who, what, when, where, why and how... in that order, are important for a journalism piece.
- Make your story newsworthy - timeliness, proximity, prominence, impact, currency, conflict, oddity.
- Make links on online pieces, so that if the reader is interested they can further their reading, and on websites having it on the front page, so that you can get more readers.
- Headlines draw attention, use them appropriately and to get the readers hooked, and first interested.
- Use English literary devices, to gain attention in feature leads, such as onomatopoeia, alliteration and colloquialism.
- Have your facts organized, and present in an interesting way.
- Use quotes.
- Organize information in a way that explains the story to the reader, whether through facts or through storytelling elements.