WHAT? Don't bury the 'What'

good advice from the Poynter Institute's tip of the day:  One of the biggest mistakes in feature writing: an over-reliance on emotion.

I totally do this!

Actually, I'm have a revelation of a sort this week. As I go back to watch the videos I've made over the past few months, in order to choose some to enter into the nppa clip contest, I noticed that I bury my 'what' in almost all my videos. Viewers have to make it half way through the video before finding out the 'what' of the story. I put the 'why' and the 'who' and the 'where' long before the what. Why do I do this? My logic up to this point has been that I want to put the most interesting parts first because I want to hook people and keep them interested and to me often the 'what' of the story is the most mundane part. But, if you don't know what you are watching or reading the 'why' becomes a great mystery. And that's when people lose interest and stop watching. It's time to change.

With that said, here's a story that I made last week about Tom Loux. Tom makes a living doing dove releases at funerals and weddings. He trains the birds, which are actually white homing pidgeons, to fly back to his home in Arvada, CO after being released. I'm telling you all this now because you won't find it out in the beginning of this video. My mistake. If I were to do it again, the editing process would go differently.