Next-generation journalists learn how to turn facts into compelling narratives that engage audiences

We have this mythology that good writers sit down at a keyboard, and beautiful things come out of their fingers.”

Patti Wolter, Helen Gurley Brown magazine professor and Charles Deering McCormick distinguished clinical professor, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism

Patti Wolter teaches her students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism that there is a place for narrative in every story, from a short news blurb to a longform magazine feature.

“In a world in which every story has the same hill to climb on engagement, why not stop and say, ‘How can I explain this in a way that makes someone say: I never thought of it that way before,’” she said. “They’re much more likely, even from that one paragraph, to finish the rest of the piece,” she said.

Since the dawn of the digital age, change has been a constant for newsrooms — much of it related to publishing platforms. But despite the advent of websites and mobile apps, social media, vertical video and podcasting, one thing has remained constant: the best journalism is based on adept storytelling.

“Certain things don’t change,” said Juan Manuel Benítez, a professor of local journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a multimedia reporter. “Good reporting, talking to people, finding good sources — relevant sources — and getting to the truth or the best representation of the truth stays the same. So, classic, old-school reporting is still present in the way I teach, and those are the main pillars.”

Classical techniques and innovative experiments

Linda Villarosa teaches journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

Linda Villarosa, a professor of journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York (CUNY), encourages her students to start reporting with a number. For example, her 2017 reporting found that if current rates continued, one in every two Black queer men would become infected with HIV.

“If you can come up with something new, something that’s changed in a community, then you find the story,” she said.

But the first step in community-based reporting is to understand it.

“What’s the [local] government there? Where do people eat? Where do people hang out? Where do people walk? Who are the leaders of the community that are maybe not elected officials? Where’s the church that everybody goes to? Understand the history of it before you report at all,” she said. “That is just the respect you pay to the community before you get started reporting.”

Villarosa also teaches her students to use the classic structure of a headline, subhead, anecdotal lead, transition, a nut graf married to the headline and subhead, followed by the body, and ending with a kicker. She said that 100% of her stories — since the time she started her career at Essence Magazine — have been built on that structure.

At Northwestern, Wolter said she encourages her students to experiment with storytelling. She’s found students learn just as much from failed experiments as successful ones. She offered an experimental example. One of her students reported on a research lab where scientists studied gait — how people walk.

“And she had two absolutely beautiful paragraphs explaining how we walk and how someone in a lab can measure how you walk,” she said. “And it was so well done because it was very visual, but it also took the thing that we all think we know how to do and broke it down into the science.”

Wolter said those two paragraphs — a small portion of the article — uplifted the entire piece. “A good exposition-based story can have moments that feel like a narrative, and that is part of what propels your reader through it,” she said.

Her narrative structure class is a five-week course that challenges students to deconstruct narratives found in feature stories, podcasts, film, advertising and other media. The class is open to students from all reporting genres, and often attracts students studying documentary filmmaking, podcasting and sports writing.

“There’s beauty in the fact that in the narrative structure class, no one’s writing or editing anything. They’re just reading, watching and listening to really good journalism and learning how to deconstruct it,” she said.

Storytelling techniques

Villarosa shares a tip with her students at CUNY — one she learned from her own editor: “Be a camera.” In other words, help the reader, viewer or listener discover the people behind the subject matter.

Villarosa has a background in science writing, and she said she often finds compelling anecdotes by asking scientists about their personal connection to their work. While reporting about the racial disparities of COVID-19 infections and the Mardi Gras parade as a superspreader event in February 2020, she learned that a scientist she interviewed had a personal connection to the area.

“Him telling the story of going to that parade for the first time was really important, and then he went right to the science of it to help me understand why that event ended up being a superspreader event,” she said. She said his personal connection helped her to understand the history and cultural importance of the event.

“It really mattered, and it helped me tell that story,” she said.

Wolter, who also has a background in science writing and teaches a class on it, said she instructs her students on pacing and giving readers the right amount of information to guide them through the story, so they’ll stay engaged while learning something new.

“If you overwhelm me with science, I’m going to bail on you, right? But if you give me the pieces so I understand, then I’m hooked. I’m with you,” she said.

Villarosa and Wolter both said their students often come into their classes with the misconception that first drafts should be close to perfection.

“We have this mythology that good writers sit down at a keyboard, and beautiful things come out of their fingers,” Wolter said, “And even though those of us who’ve done it for a living know that it’s hard as hell … every single class I teach is really about revision and getting people comfortable with the fact that the first draft is usually not good enough, and that beautiful things don’t just fly out of everyone’s fingers.”

Villarosa also observed that students can feel discouraged by heavy-handed editing, though substantive editing is an essential part of storytelling. She’s brought to class some of her own story drafts to show how they’re covered with red marks from her editor.

“This is the relationship you have with your editor,” she explains to her students. “This is what it can look like. You don’t have a perfect draft.” It’s an invaluable lesson for students embarking on professional careers in news.

Social media and television are helpful teaching aids.

Wolter encourages her students to pay attention when they stop reading an article or watching a show, or a video on TikTok. It helps them recognize ineffective narratives that can doom their own storytelling. It also illustrates that narrative journalism isn’t confined to a single platform.

Juan Manuel Benítez is a multimedia reporter who teaches local news reporting at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York City. (Photo credit: Simone Civale)

At Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Benítez said he encourages students to produce a vertical video, under 90 seconds in length, to introduce audiences to their work, which might be longform text. A successful example came from a 2026 graduate, Oliver Hall, who spent months covering New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and his strategy of “pothole politics.” To draw audiences to his longform reporting, he posted a succinct, witty and well-paced video on social media.

Benítez said Hall’s work was an example of using new technology to promote “old-school reporting.” He encourages his students to use technology, even artificial intelligence, but not to replace their writing and reporting — rather, to create efficiencies on tasks, giving them more time for diligent reporting.

“The basics never change. The technology gets better, but good journalism always relies on great reporting and great writing,” he said. “That’s not going to change.”

From a news business perspective, skillful storytelling turns fact-based journalism into something audiences perceive as valuable and potentially worth paying for. Reporters who can communicate clearly, but in an engaging way, can distinguish their reporting from other news outlets’ coverage. And a well-told story is more likely to be read, listened to or watched to the end; people may revisit it, share it and discuss it with others. 

Villarosa said teaching journalism keeps her from falling into a cynical trap. She sees her students succeeding with their journalism degrees, both within the industry and in applying their journalism skills to other career paths. Dr. Vanda Seward became one of Villarosa’s students as a woman in her 60s and went on to publish a memoir about her work in the prison system.

“It’s really thrilling to see the success that my students have,” Villarosa said. “I have a lot of hope, and I see a lot of promise.”

When E&P spoke with Wolter in September, she was gearing up to teach another round of students about narrative structure, a class she started teaching 15 years ago. “Every single time I teach it, I fall in love with storytelling again, and it’s fun to see the students do, too,” she said.

Alyssa Choiniere is a freelance journalist based in southwestern Pennsylvania. She is writing a nonfiction book for Rutgers University Press, “Be Home Before the Streetlights Come On: The Political Hijacking of Child-Trafficking Terror.”