A model hard news story

Hard news, which I'll oversimplify a little and define as stories that run the next day (or the same day on the internet) about fires, wrecks, crimes, etc., doesn't have to be badly written. Here's a fire story in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution that can serve as a model for how to write a well crafted police beat story and how quotes gathered at the scene to bring it to life.

So there are two principles here: (1) Write well. (2) Go to the scene. If the fire is already out, visit the family. Talk with them face to face. You just don't get the human side of the story over the phone.

Here's how the AJC's Tessie Borden put together the story of a fatal fire in suburban Clarkston, headed "4 killed in DeKalb apartment fire." Notice how the lede unfolds over three grafs:

A 14-year-old boy jumped out a window of his burning apartment to get help while his grandmother tried to make sure the other seven children in the two-bedroom, first-floor unit got out safely.

Christian Jackson got the help, from neighbors and later firefighters, but not all the children got out safely.

Four died in the 8 p.m. Tuesday fire at 942 North Indian Creek Drive in Clarkston, across from the Clarkston library branch. The victims ranged in age from 3 to 11, according to family members.

I would have led with something like "Four children died in a fire ..." But The Journal-Constitition is major metro. I won't argue. It just goes to show newswriting is about people, and it's an art not a science.

Borden continues by telling how the children died, as best she can reconstruct the confusion of the fire:

Most of the children were asleep in a bedroom when one of Christian's sisters smelled smoke and came runninig for Christian, who was in his bedroom watching television with his grandmother, 68-year-old Lucy Pyne, the children's babysitter.

Christian said he went for help while Payne awoke the other children and tried to get them out. She had to be pulled from the apartment by neighbors.

Christian's sister, Decontee Pyne, 12, said she heard her little sister call Christian. She went out of the bedroom and found smoke in the living room.

"I ran through the fire," she said. She said that once outside, "We started screaming and we tell the people to please come help."

That takes us into the body of the story.

After doing her best to piece together who died in the fire, a difficult job because not all the victims had yet been officially identified and not all the survivors speak English, Borden sets the scene by saying, "Family members said Felecia Jackson -- an immigrant from Liberia -- lived in the apartment with her seven children and Lucy Pyne, their grandmother." Then Borden tells of an interview with the family:

Felecia Jackson was at a relative's apartment on Wednesday morning at the Kensington Station apartments, a few miles from the fire scene.

Jackson, in a gray sweatshirt, sat in the middle of the living room. She was so stricken she could barely speak.

On a sofa next to her was her sister, Deborah Welah, whose only child, 3-year-old Hawa, also died in the fire.

Whenever Jackson would get a phone call or someone would talk to her, she would sob.

Welah, who is pregnant, stared blankly, trying to understand how she could lose Hawa. "She's my world," she said.

The grandmother, Lucy Pyne, was in a bedroom, and could be heard crying periodically. She came out of the bedroom at one point and need assistance walking.

A reporter also went to the scene of the fire in suburban DeKalb County and interviewed eyewitnesses. Here's how Borden tells that part of the story:

Several of the children attended Indian Creek Elementary school, said 9-year-old DeRon Williams. DeRon, a third-grader at Indian Creek, lives in an adjacent apartment building; the front door of his apartment is about 40 feet from the charred building.

He said his neighbors were "really nice kids. They liked to roughhouse and jump on things."

He said that when the fire stated Tuesday night, "I looked outside and there were flames everywhere -- just blazing flames."

Tesfay Kassa, 30, who lived in the unit above Jackson's, said he was writing a letter to his brother in Ethiopia when suddenly the apartment was engulfed in thick, black smoke that seemed to come from the unit below him.

"I was telling him things I was thankful for, like school and about my mother, and then I couldn't see anything," Kassa said.

He felt his way through the apartment, shook his sleeping roommate awake and ran downstairs in time to pull the children's grandmother through a ground-floor window.

They then tried to get to the others who were trapped. "We kicked in the door and the flame came jumping out," Kassa said.

Borden's story was obviously written on deadline. I see things like incorrect verb tenses that would have been cleaned up if her editors had more time to process the story. But it's a good piece of hard news writing, based on good reporting. It's worth studying in detail.

Notice, too, how it follows the inverted pyramid style. That's especially clear toward the end, when the story gets off into related material that has less and less direct connection with the fire as it goes along:

The apartment complex houses mostly immigrants from Mexico and several African countries, many of whom live two to a room in two-bedroom units that rent for about $415 a month.

In Clarkston, about 11 miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, 1 in 3 people were born in countries such as Bosnia, Ethiopia and Vietnam.

The town has the highest concentration of Africans and Europeans of any city in Georgia and the second highest concentration of Asians, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Members of metro Atlanta's closely knit Liberian community were trying to help the family. The Rev. William B.G.K. Harris, pastor of International Christian Fellowship Ministries, which has a mostly Liberian congregation, said he fielded calls all Wednesday morning about the family.

"People are concerned," he said. "They want to know what they can do to help and we want to see what we can do to support them. Even trying to bury them may be a big challenge."

Harris said refugees have few, if any, resources to fall back on in case of emergencies. Most of the time, he said, they don't have insurance.

Allen Shaklan, executive director of Clarkston-based Refugee Family Services, said the children were involved in an after-school program. He said the agency, which provides services to refugee and immigrant women and children, had worked with the family since the fall.

"We're trying to find out what we can do to help," he said.

Dee Massengale was on her way to the International Rescue Committee when she heard about the fire. She went to the Indian Creek apartments, found out where the family was staying, and brought the items there.

The family began looking through the items for clothing and toys for the children.

"I gave the family my card. I wanted them to know there are strangers out there that care," Massengale said. "It's devastating to go through a war, and then to come here and have this happen," a teary-eyed Massengale said.

While Borden's byline is on the story, it took five reporters to put it together. A credit line at the end says, "Staff writers Saeed Ahmed, Mike Morris, Shelia M. Poole and Mark Bixler contributed to this report." In a case like this, the byline usually goes to the reporter who contacted the fire department and interviewed eyewitnesses.