Journalism Basics: The nut graph

By Rob Golub

This site serves everyone from experienced to new journalists, to even those who are just journalism curious.

If you could use a journalism 101 guide, a walkway to some core ideas, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve been training new journalists for 20 years. This page is meant to serve as a rapid initiation into written journalism. For that, one of the most important concepts in written journalism is the nut graph.

The nut graph is the starting point that launches every great story. If you want to do written journalism, you must understand the nut graph.

What is the nut graph?

Journalism students are often taught that a nut graph is a sentence or short paragraph near the top of a story that answers one simple question: “Why should I care about this?” It’s sometimes called the “why we care” paragraph.

This is a fair description, yet I’ve found it can be confusing language for new journalists, partly because the word “care” can be taken in different directions. I find it’s more useful to think about the nut graph as answering a different question: “Why are we doing this story?”

It’s the same paragraph, just a different way of thinking about it: Why are we doing this story?

After we answer that, the rest of the story connects with the nut graph, often proves it with sourcing. This makes the writing easier, the reporting in service of a purpose. You’ll get focused, in a good way.

In good newsrooms, editors often ask: “What’s the nut?”

If the writer can’t answer that, the story isn’t ready to be written.

An example

Instead of:

“A meeting was held Tuesday night at City Hall…”

 A nut graph might say:

 “A tense City Council meeting Tuesday highlighted growing divisions over how the city should balance public safety concerns with free speech — a debate that has intensified since October.”

Same event. Much clearer purpose.

Why are we doing this story? Not just because there was a meeting. No, if it was a meeting about which bank the city should use, it might not be story worthy at all. But a tense meeting that can honestly be distilled down to public safety vs. free speech – that’s why we are doing the story. We are writing a story because of the tenseness and the indisputable reality behind the facts. So that’s our nut graph.

Looking for more lessons in basic journalism? Stay tuned in the months to come!