This week I kept coming back to one question from class: what makes something newsworthy instead of only sensational?
I think the difference often appears in what happens after the first reaction.
Sensational information makes me stop.
Newsworthy information gives me a reason to keep reading.
For example, in the feature article I wrote this week, Dr. Mélodie BOUEYA lives with sickle cell disease. That fact can immediately attract attention. It is serious. It is personal. It would be very easy to build the entire headline and article around it.
But that alone would not make the story good.
What made the story more interesting to me was what came around that fact. She grew up in Brazzaville, her parents divorced, she was often ill, and today she manages several businesses, works as an international business coach and travels frequently.
Even then, I had to be careful.
A headline such as “Sick Woman Defies Death to Become CEO” might attract clicks. I would never use it. It exaggerates, reduces the person to illness and tells the reader how to feel before the article even begins. I thought about headline choices a lot this week — I wrote about testing ten different headlines for one article and how much a single word can shift a story.
The real story was quieter.
I sat in her office on Oct. 7 expecting to talk mostly about leadership. Somewhere during the interview, I realized that the stronger angle was about how she learned to make decisions while living with limits that never completely disappeared.
That is newsworthy to me because it gives the reader something real to understand.
Sensational writing often wants the strongest emotional word.
News writing needs the strongest useful fact.
Those are not always the same thing. The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics puts it more formally: seek truth and report it, but also minimize harm.
I am starting to see that tension more clearly when I choose quotes too. A dramatic quote might be memorable, but if it represents only five seconds of a 30-minute conversation, I need to ask whether I am choosing it because it explains the person or because it makes my article look stronger.
I did not think much about that before this course.
Now I do.
