By classtime on Friday, develop an indepth abstract, a plan to guide your reporting and writing. The abstract should follow this structure:
1. Working Nut graph. Develop a theme paragraph that will guide your research and that will serve as an umbrella statement for your entire story. It might change depending on your reporting, but you need a thesis to guide your reporting.
Example: The increased connectedness of the university’s human resources department has opened the faculty, staff and students to increasing hacking threats. The university has been forced to respond by hiring more and better trained technology professionals.
2. More complete description of the idea. Expound on your idea. Here’s where you can include questions. Things you don’t know the answer to. But the questions you ask have to be answerable in a 700-word story. (Don’t ask: How does the university find people to donate to it?)
3. Ideal news feature lead. Describe how you would like your story to begin, focusing on an individual and his or her action. Using Jack Hart’s Lexicon of Leads, identify it as anecdotal, narrative, scene-setter, scene-wrap (gallery), significant detail, single instance or word play.
Example: On a Friday in early December 2013, Wendy Jones knew something was wrong. By 10 a.m., she had already received calls from three faculty and staff members letting her know their paychecks had not been deposited on Dec. 1. She would soon discover it was the most serious breech of the university’s human resources system since it went online and the result of a sophisticated and widespread phishing effort.
“We still don’t know who was behind it,” Jones said, “but I’d sure like to get my hands on them.”
4. List of sources. Where will you get your information? Ideally these will be human sources and data sources. You will need at least 5-7 sources to get a good feel for the story. That doesn’t mean you have to quote or reference them all.