Top tip: Give your audience a break(out)

not teaching,
still THINKING …

Stuck on a story idea? It happens.

But when news breaks or even when covering routine events, here is a good way to generate ideas, provide important information and involve your audience at the same time.

It’s called a breakout. And it works because it provides a point of entry for the audience.

A breakout tells people: Here is something else to know; here is another place to tap or swipe; here is a new direction. Breakouts can be interactive. They can be smart icons that take people where they want to go.

Here are our top choices of things to break out — all 30 of them:

1. Lists of all kinds
2. Background information
3. Next steps
4. Causes
5. Effects
6. Biographical information
7. Names
8. Phone numbers
9. Addresses
10. URLs
11. Dates
12. Facts at a glance
13. History
14. Questions and answers
15. Sequence of events
16. Reactions
17. Reasons
18. Symptoms
19. Treatments
20. Chronologies/Timelines
21. Costs
22. Examples
23. Quotes
24. Directions
25. Event information — place, time, date, cost, parking
26. How-tos
27. Laws, rules, regulations
28. Where to donate
29. Where to volunteer
30. Where to find more information

Breakouts are also a way to keep a story alive and move it forward. Take the recent fire at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. It’s a tragic event whose story is still being told. And a good number of breakouts on this list have been — and could be — employed to tell it.

(These two profs are no longer teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, but we are still thinking.)