“Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.

Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the student had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does. A journalist gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five W’s–who, what, where, when and why.

As students sat in front of the manual typewriters, Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts; “Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills HIgh School, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacremento nest Thursday for a colloquuium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropolist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly High School faculty Thursday in Sacremento..blah, blah, blah.

The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then he laid them aside and paused for a moment.


Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is There will be no school next Thursday.’”

“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls.  “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about re gurgitating the facts but figuring out the point.  It wasn’t enough to know the who, what, when, and where, you had to understand what it meant.  And, why it mattered.”  For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment had a secret–a hidden point that the students had to figure out in order to produce a good story.”

~from Make It Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath