A complex story should not be challenging to the reader, however challenging it is for the writer. Careful work in organization of your reporting and writing will help readers make sense of stories that deal with cumbersome economic or technical issues, or with soap-opera tales that present multiple characters and confusing turns. These techniques will help keep the complex story clear.

If there is one thing many newspapers around the world seem to have in common, it is the rigid adherence to the Inverted Pyramid as a style of news presentation. Editors justify the Inverted Pyramid as an effective way of informing readers very quicky about what happened, when, where, why, to whom it happened and how, without losing their interest and attention. Though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, it has created the impression that all the news has to be reported in the first paragraph, hence the use of summary leads.

Don Fry, of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, distributed this list of questions that reporters should ask themselves when making decisions about use of anonymous sources. They brought hot debate from journalists attending a conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Here are some basic writing guidelines from Skip Issacs, a former reporter, foreign and Washington correspondent, and editor for The Baltimore Sun.

The writer's basic tool is the sentence. But it, in turn, rests on an even more fundamental unit.