Across Twin Cities, smart home surveillance systems are a new brand of neighborhood watch

 By Jane Lee

This week, we have learned several structures for news writing. As a writer, you need to be able to decide the most effective structure depending on your story because readers are not really patient and also have short attention spans.

The inverted pyramid is the most common way that journalists organize their stories. The martini glass is also used when a journalist has the inverted pyramid summary of the story and shift the flow into a chronological order of background story.

I think the article from The Star Tribune uses another structure which is the Kabob format. It begins with a story of a specific person, Karen Thornburg. After some details of the story(who, what, when, where, why and how) in a nut graph, the story discusses the important information about smart home surveillance systems. Then the story adds some meats like the partnership between police departments and Ring, privacy issues, and law enforcement. It ends by bringing to a person again and concluding with a quote.