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One of the toughest things to train a new web producer on is tease-writing. Writing a very short amount of text to inform and excite a reader takes plenty of discipline and attention to detail.
Some news websites employ teases throughout their site, charging producers with creating engaging content to get readers to click into full stories. That doesn’t mean readers always get what they expect.
Poor teasers result from lazy producing, lack of training and automation.
DO YOU MAKE THESE TEASER-WRITING MISTAKES
1. Publishing before reading your tease out loud. No you don’t always have to do this, but it does help you catch embarrassing mistakes. Ever publish a spelling error or omit a word in your tease or headline that trainwrecks the whole thing? What about missing those altogether and a flawed tease is on your homepage for the good portion of the morning.
Slap your tease in Word or Google Docs and check your spelling, then read the tease out loud to yourself. If the words sound awful or awkward, you might want to rethink your teaser wording.
** Make sure you check your links too :)
2. Copy and paste the headline and lead of a story into the tease. The only times I can see this as acceptable is when a producer is faced with a breaking news situation and must get the news out fast, or if there’s hardly any other details to report besides what is presented in the lead. Repeating the headline and lead of a story in a tease is lazy producing – and I know, I’ve done it.
Readers need the details of a story. They need to know why they should click to read more. If a producer can’t pick out useful details, then maybe the story isn’t all that useful.
Example:
3. Leave out the details of a story. Some producers say that if a tease contains all the details of a story, then readers won’t click into a story to read more. WRONG!
On the web, hiding details from the reader doesn’t work. Readers don’t have time or desire to read a 18 inch story and piece together what important information they need to know. That’s why teaser-writing is so important. A tease acts as a guide to the story, highlighting the important information that a reader needs to know. Do it effectively, and you will pique the readers’ interests and they will click into the story to understand it all.
4. Ignore the timeliness of a story. What does timeliness have to do with teaser-writing? Well, producers need to understand what details of the story are still relevant and present them to the reader. Relevant details of a story change throughout the day and week.
Real-time example: Hillary Clinton visited Michigan in March to lobby for state lawmakers to approve a second Democratic primary. The morning story talked about her goal and when and where she would visit – and that’s what the teaser told readers. Once 10:30 a.m. hit and her speech began, a producer needs to update the tease to reflect relevant details. The time of her speech doesn’t matter anymore, but her message and reaction to her message do matter.
5. Highlight irrelevant details: Above, you see a Freep.com tease regarding the Spartans “playing their best basketball.” This tease appeared at the top of the site the morning after Michigan State beat higher-ranked Pitt to advance to the sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament. The game occurred the previous night in Denver and ended shortly before midnight.
How likely is it that everyone that might visit the Freep’s site and be interested in the Spartans would know that the Spartans had beaten Pitt the night before? I’d say it’s pretty unlikely.
What matters in this case is not that the Spartans are playing their best basketball, but that MSU beat Pitt and is in the sweet 16. Producers can’t rely on site users to know the news before coming to their news site. Make sure the details in your tease match what readers want to know when they want to know it. Think about what is useful to the user before hitting the publish button.
6. Use newspapers’ headlines. Terrible, terrible, terrible x 1 million idea. Print headlines are not written for an online audience. Chalk this one up to lazy producing as well. Web headlines need to be direct and tell the story. Forget the cutesy modifiers. (post coming this week on the differences between web and print headlines)
Example
7 . Write in passive voice. There’s debate to this one, but I’ve found active tense to be much more engaging and it gives the feeling of “present” news – news that is happening now.
How to write in active tense? Replace helping verbs such as “is,” “was,” “are,” “were,” “have,” “had,” and “has” with action verbs whenever possible.
What are your teaser-writing best practices?
These are just a few of the main items that new producers struggle with. What are your tips for writing good teasers for your stories?
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Word and Google make reasonable spell checkers and i use ‘em, too, but i feel a fit of pique when i peek at a story and see peak where pique should go.
Ha, thanks for the example John. That’s one I didn’t think to include – choosing the right form of a word.
Great post — I was surprised that the Freep didn’t directly state anything in its teaser about the MSU win, but then again I live in East Lansing…
Great post-I will bookmark this as part of my style guide.