Keep Topic and Audience in Mind for Technology Pieces

Helping the average reader understand a technology piece is a fine-tuned craft for many business reporters.

To achieve that, reporters must present facts clearly, in a way all readers can understand.

At The Los Angeles Times, tech reporters choose stories about hot-button issues that affect a broad base of readers, such as identity theft.

Last week, Times technology and business reporter David Colker covered a security breach at LexisNexis that released personal data on more than 30,000 Americans.

"The most important things we try to do in telling stories are to tell the facts and to be accurate," he says.

Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, takes a different approach to writing the complex story -- the narrative form. That device works, he says, because it is how people naturally think. And by framing unfamiliar topics in a human context, reporters can make their stories easier to read.

"You need to have the reader enter this alien world," says Franklin, a journalism professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and author of five books. Narrative writing guides readers into stories often overloaded with experts.

But reporters should target their writing styles depending on the topic and audience. Reporters need not give an informed reader too many unnecessary facts, but must ensure average readers have enough background to grasp the news.

"If you're at a business journal writing a story that is technical, but you also have a knowledgeable readership, narrative will seem overwritten," Franklin says. "You have to think in terms of where you reader is coming from and give them the information they need without the extraneous stuff."

Audience is key, says Peter Howe, a Boston Globe reporter who covers personal technology.

When writing stories on high-tech gadgets, he tries to focus on what the device does and why that would be important to someone who is not a telecom insider.

His recent story about cell phones that allow "voice over Internet protocol, using a 'wireless fidelity' high-speed Internet connection" is a good example. His translation of that jargon: "a cell phone that becomes a cordless phone for super-cheap Internet phone service when you get within range of a wireless Internet connection."

"If I were explaining this phone to my sister-in-law, what would I say?" he asks. In answering the question, his voice becomes more clear and understandable.

Howe says covering technology is an art, rather than a science, especially when it comes to discerning what is important to readers.

"I try to trust my own gut when choosing story," he says. "I'm always trying to evaluate what is the order of magnitude in terms of the news, and how different is this from what is already out there. It is especially important to make the distinction between quantum leaps and incremental tweaks."

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism