How to break news

The stories that take off the quickest on campus are breaking news. They are exciting and they get posted on hundreds of Facebook walls within minutes.

As soon as you hear of a story or see someone mentioning it on social media, quickly write about four paragraphs on your phone and send it to your editor. Often stories come from emails to the student body about crimes or big decisions.

Here are some of the best ones our student teams broke in September and October, all of which were read by between 3,000 and 20,000 readers by the end of the day.

The highest traffic stories are often ones that are useful. Like free Ubers…

 Or news about a bar that has been closed or suspended…

 Try to get new information about stories that are going viral on college Facebook groups…

Or stories linking big celebrities to a university – the stronger the link the better… Major events on campus are obvious breaking news material…

And some stories come from checking what is really going on during a big event.

Other types of breaking stories:

• A Facebook post with more than 200 likes on Facebook.
• A poster which people are offended by
• A lecturer doing something funny or controversial.
• An incident of mistreatment or injustice, like police harassment.