Nut Graphs

I was wondering if anyone out there has any ideas on teaching leads and nut graphs to young reporters. I need to keep it at an hour, make it interactive and make certain they don't feel like they are going back to the basics, even though they are.
I thought about giving them notes to a story and having them answer what is this story about and what is the lead and nut graph and then show them the finished product. Any other ideas that have worked for you guys?
Julie Cryser - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

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On nut grafs, one suggestion is to show a few examples of stories that have inadequate or buried nut grafs and ask the reporters to pretend they're readers and tell you where they think the story is going. I use this approach sometimes in editing classes, and find that students often make wildly different guesses about the story's focus. That in itself is a good argument for nut grafs. I don't have any examples off the top of my head. It usually isn't too difficult to find them, though. Look at Page 1 or local fronts for feature stories that are dummied into small holes. Occasionally, the nut graf is an inch or two into the jump.
John Russial - University of Oregon

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Donald Murray's WRITING FOR YOUR READERS contains short chapters about leads that make great springboards for discussion.
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Re net grafs: I'm going to be a heretic and suggest that there doesn't always have to be a specific graph that is The Nut Graph. Seems to me, that rule can cause problems in narrative-style stories. The reporter does have to let the reader know why the story is written – high in the story – but the nut graph is only one way of doing so. Critical info can also be woven into the first few graphs. It needs to be there. But reporters have a choice of forms.
When young reporters, in particular, get the idea that there MUST be a nut GRAPH, you can get what I call "flour in the brownie." You're eating this nice brownie, and suddenly you hit a chunk of dry flour. Young reporter is trying to satisfy the editor who (reporter thinks) insists on the graph, so he/she sticks in a dense paragraph that breaks the flow of the story.
At a couple of papers I've visited, the whole staff was doing this. Like clockwork, the dry chunk would appear two or three graphs down. When reporter is asked why, reporter sez "They make us do it." I suggest teaching several ways a reporter can focus the top of the story. But the editors should be part of the session.
Kate Long - Charleston Gazette

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I'll second that! My theory is that the hallowed Nut Graf was named after the first editor who insisted that every story must have one. Yes, every story must convey quickly and clearly to the reader why this story is important and interesting. But we must encourage creativity and innovation in telling the story. The insistence on every story having a nut graf (I love the flour-in-the-brownie analogy and intend to steal it) is as anti-creative as trying to make every story fit any other formula, such as the inverted pyramid, the narrative or the anecdotal lede. You should teach the nut graf as one way, but not the only way, to tell the leader quickly why she should read the story.
I suggest to writers that it's often helpful to write the lede last. You can spend a lot of time laboring over the lede and then short-change the rest of the story. If you're stuck on the lede, I suggest writing a simple declarative sentence, even something ultra-boring like: "This is a story about sewer systems." Then proceed to write the story. Usually, before you're finished, you'll realize what the lede should be and go back to the top and write it. If not, you can probably fix it easier after you've written the rest of the story than you could as the first chore. Sometimes, you'll find that the simple declarative sentence makes a good lede. I theorize that Moses was stuck for a lede and just wrote a simple declarative sentence, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Then when he was finished with the story, he went back to work on his lede and discovered that in 10 simple words he had covered the time angle, his main character, a strong verb and the basic conflict. Good lede.
Steve Buttry - Omaha World-Herald

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What are the skills you are hoping to train on in these sessions? That's the first thing to figure out. Then how to do the training will be a much easier second question.
From your description, it sounds like these young reporters have trouble identifying the news or main point of the story. What skill do they need to do that? Critical thinking skills? Better knowledge of the subject or beat? The exercise you describe sounds like a good idea. Just be able to describe some of your criteria for "about" (or main point), types of leads you like at your paper, nut graph, etc..
Could be a writing problem? They know what the news/main point is, but they lack the skills to summarize it in a single paragraph. That would be a whole different session.
Michael Roberts - Cincinnati Enquirer

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I'm a huge Kate Long fan -- a male groupie, in fact. So even when she makes a typo, it has Freudian meaning for me. Notice that she writes: "re net grafs" Not "nut" grafs. But "net" grafs. I'm thinking that this is a better term for this important device. The "nut" is supposed to signify the hard kernel of the story, what is at the center. But it's a clumsy metaphor, because it suggests there is a shell that has to be cracked to get to it.
Perhaps the "net graph" captures the meaning of the story, and, with it, the reader's understanding.
Roy Peter Clark - Poynter Institute

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A few months later the discussion revived with this posting and the following responses:

An editor asked me for advice on explaining in a compelling and convincing way why nut graphs are important and how to craft a good one. Recommendations?
Michael Weinstein - The Charlotte Observer

Here are two good items I've saved from people who are much smarter than me:
Curtis A. Hubbard - Boulder Daily Camera

• The nut graph is used when the lead is anecdotal or indirect. If the lead begins with a desert scene, the nut graph describes the significance of the scene: it was an important atomic test site in the 1950s. If the lead begins with the description of a funeral, the nut graph offers the basic news value: the dead person is the first woman killed in an underground mine accident.
  The technique gets its name because the graph contains the "nut" or "hard center" of the story. - Roy Peter Clark and Don Fry
• At their most basic, these simply literary devices tell readers why news and feature stories are relevant to them. That alone demonstrates that writers and editors are concerned about reader needs. But effective nut paragraphs can do far more. They can answer any questions raised in leads, explain why stories are significant and place stories in meaningful contexts. They help writers organize their own material. They provide cues for headline writers, copy editors and designers. They shorten stories by creating a tight organizational focus, and they suggest an outline for the story to follow.
  Most importantly, they provide a rationale for reading by suggesting benefits. Just like the paragraph you just read. - Jack Hart, The Oregonian

Nut graphs add context and significance as well as resoundingly answer the question: Why the heck should I read this? Nut graphs are the ultimate backstop for news.
Tom Silvestri

Tom is dead-on when he describes so succinctly the significance of nut grafs.
I would go only one word further:
Why the heck should I read this today?
Why the heck are you telling me this today?
Rosalie Stemer - Stamford Advocate

Two decades ago when I first started working on a study of what I then called "literary" writing techniques in newspapers, I interviewed Mike Sager of the Washington Post. Sager didn't like nut graphs, he told me, because the reader can read just the graph and decide if s/he wants to continue.
"I consider my time wasted if my story is dismissed out of hand on the basis of subject. How do the readers know they're not interested if they haven't read the story? Life is fascinating, and if told properly, any slice of it can be too."
Even though it has become formulaic and predictable, I recognize the utility of the nut graph, but I always try to get my students first to try writing without one to see if they can create the kind of story Mike Sager proposes.
R. Thomas Berner - Penn State University

Similar to Mike Sager's approach, Mitch Zuckoff of The Boston Globe avoids nut grafs, preferring "all narrative, all the time." His "Choosing Naia" series won him the ASNE non-deadline award for 2000.
William Chronister - The Plain Dealer

With all due respect to Bill Chronister, a fine editor - and writer - I recall hearing Mitch Zuckoff use the word "reveal" as his term of choice for what a nut graf accomplishes: using summary narrative, in addition to dramatic narrative, to signal the purpose of the story.
Whatever you call it (my personal favorite is the Philadelphia Inquirer's "you may have been wondering why we invited you to this party" graf), I believe it's valuable because it provides another window into the heart of the story, and answers the reader's question others have raised: what's this all about?
Here, in the first part of "Choosing Naia," the lead begins with a scene, six paragraphs long, followed by an 8-graf Reveal. At this length, Christine Martin of West Virginia Univ. prefers the term "nut zone."

By Mitchell Zuckoff

Tierney looks radiant in a new black-and-white striped dress, smiling and chatting as she pulls it up to expose a gentle bulge in her normally flat stomach.

She lies on a table in a fourth-floor obstetrics room at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford. Her husband Greg sits in a chair beside her, watching as a technician begins the routine ultrasound test that is their last task before a weeklong vacation on Martha's Vineyard.

The technician, Maryann Kolano, strokes Tierney's belly with a sonogram wand, using sound waves to create a picture of the life inside. Greg studies the video screen, fascinated by the details emerging from what looks like a half-developed Polaroid. An arm here, a leg there, a tiny face in profile. Then the internal organs: brain, liver, kidneys.

''I'm having a hard time seeing the heart. Maybe the baby's turned,'' Kolano says calmly. Then it appears, pumping in a confident rhythm. She stops the moving image, capturing a vivid cross-section, and Greg remembers his high school biology.

''All mammals have four chambers in the heart,'' Greg thinks to himself. ''There are only three chambers there.''

''You know,'' Kolano says tactfully, ''I'm not as good at this as some other people. Maybe somebody else should take a look.'' She tries to mask her alarm as she leaves the room.

The inescapable truth is staring at Tierney and Greg from the silent screen: There is no fourth chamber. There is a hole in the heart. And not just any hole, they will soon learn. It is a telltale sign of Down syndrome, a genetic stew of physical defects and mental retardation.

A hole in the heart. In their baby's, and suddenly, in their own.

The date is July 24, 1998, and Tierney Temple-Fairchild and Greg Fairchild have just entered a world of technological wizardry and emotional uncertainty called ''prenatal screening.'' It is a confusing place where even the name is misleading; abortion screening is more accurate.

Most disorders tested for today -- including Down syndrome, muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibrosis -- cannot be corrected. That means the most common question prompted by distressing prenatal test results is not, ''How can we fix it?'' It is: ''Should this pregnancy continue?''

Those questions are growing rapidly for countless couples who, like Tierney and Greg, would consider abortion under certain circumstances. Researchers say they are within two years of deciphering the blueprint of human development -- the genetic code that acts as the operating instructions for creating life. That achievement is expected to drive prenatal screening into the realm of science fiction. Then what? Does a woman carry to term a baby susceptible to mental illness? Cancer? Obesity? Infertility?

Already, hard science has far outpaced the emotional side of the equation. People can learn a great deal about their unborn children, but no one tells them how to handle that knowledge, or what the future might hold. That void will be filled in days ahead by the competing and sometimes ill-informed voices of Tierney and Greg's family and friends. Some will urge abortion -- the choice made by up to 90 percent of people in their situation -- while others will be horrified by the idea.

Complicating matters will be pressures of race, faith, and timing -- less than two weeks after the final diagnosis, Tierney's pregnancy will reach the stage where abortion is illegal except to protect her life or health, neither of which is at risk.

All that makes theirs a journey through uncharted terrain, filled with fears and tears. Tierney and Greg will be tested and torn, changing their minds repeatedly as they confront a new reality amid the ache of lost dreams.

After a break, Mitch picks up the narrative thread. You can read the entire series online at http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/naia/ or wait for the book Mitch is writing.
Christopher "Chip" Scanlan - The Poynter Institute

Point well-taken: When writers can excel at the narrative, the nut graph can be shelved. But read enough non-elite newspapers and you'll find the nut graph keeps the reader from going nuts. Err on the side of over-disclosing what the news story is about and why it's worth reading.
Tom Silvestri

I think "non-deadline" is a distinction worth noting.
Nut -- or "so what" -- grafs are a great tool for deadline/daily reporting in two respects. They help reporters focus on the story at hand and, in my view, trail only headlines and photographs for their ability to draw short-on-time readers into a daily story.
Are they always necessary? Certainly not. Kudos to the writer who can keep readers' attention without them.
Curtis Hubbard

The value of the nut graph increases, I think, when you view it in a proper perspective: that of the reader. They are busy. Each one must decide whether to read and whether to keep reading, often making these decisions line by line, even word by word - which is why we eliminate the bricks in their way (jargon, wordiness, etc.). It's a very real decision: whether the time they spend reading is worth the time they lose to do other things in life.
It may be true that some readers will quit after they find out what the story is about, but this is not necessarily bad. We also lose readers when we leave them in doubt or trick them into spending more time. These readers wind up disappointed or, even worse, offended.
As writers, editors and writing coaches, we need to help writers to focus a little more on what the reader needs. We're trying to buy their time. This is the value of the nut graph.
Mitchell Zuckoff's story "Choosing Naia" has been mentioned as a narrative that doesn't use a nut graph. Maybe we're squabbling over semantics here; maybe for long stories it's too confined, if not impossible, to have a single nut graph. "Choosing Naia" is a tremendous story I've admired and studied for a while now. But even this long narrative contains a series of graphs that performs the function a nut graph.
The story opens with narrative of the key moment when the problem was discovered: an unborn baby with a birth defect. The opening scene itself helps bring the reader to the heart of the story. Even the first quotation focuses directly upon the problem, which is gripping for anyone who has a child. A technician is quoted saying: "I'm having a hard time seeing the heart."
By the seventh graph, the reader is finding out a broader perspective of the problem facing these parents and their unborn child: a hole in the baby's heart. Then comes a powerful use of fragments in the eighth graph: A hole in the heart. In their baby's, and suddenly, in their own. What a gripping, emotion-laden transition into the heart of the story, which follows.
The reader is introduced to the complex issues of Down syndrome, prenatal screening, abortion and science vs. faith. The last four graphs of the 15-paragraph introduction qualifies, I think, as the heart - the nut graph - of the story. These four paragraphs serve two functions: they inform the reader of the issues this story will address, and they keep the reader attached to the people, thus making an excellent transition into the extensive narrative that will follow.
Here are the 12th through 15th graphs:

Already, hard science has far outpaced the emotional side of the equation. People can learn a great deal about their unborn children, but no one tells them how to handle that knowledge, or what the future might hold.

That void will be filled in days ahead by the competing and sometimes ill-informed voices of Tierney and Greg's family and friends. Some will urge abortion - the choice made by up to 90 percent of people in their situation - while others will be horrified by the idea.

Complicating matters will be pressures of race, faith, and timing - less than two weeks after the final diagnosis, Tierney's pregnancy will reach the stage where abortion is illegal except to protect her life or health, neither of which is at risk.

All that makes theirs a journey through uncharted terrain, filled with fears and tears. Tierney and Greg will be tested and torn, changing their minds repeatedly as they confront a new reality amid the ache of lost dreams.

The reader thus knows what this story is about.
Thus, when we think of this from the reader's perspective, the nut graph is vital - even in long narratives. Whether we call it a nut graph or something else, it doesn't matter. But the reader needs to know fairly quickly what the story is about - or they quit reading. They generally don't have time to waste reading information they don't want or need.
Merlin Mann - Abilene Christian University