A founder once sent me his homepage and asked me to punch it up. The headline said his company was a leading provider of innovative, integrated solutions. I read it four times and still couldn't have told you what they sold. Three paragraphs down, almost as an afterthought, was the actual story: they had cut the cost of a critical lab test by ninety percent. The lede was sitting in the basement, and the brochure language was up on the marquee.
I came up as a reporter before I ever wrote a line of positioning, and the two jobs turned out to be the same job run in reverse. A marketer starts at the destination: here's what we want people to believe, now find the words to push it. A journalist starts at the source: here's what's true, here's what the reader needs, and the story is whatever honestly connects the two. The second way is harder and slower. It's also the only one that earns trust, because it doesn't feel like being sold to. Four newsroom habits carry straight over.
Find the lede, then don't bury it
Every reporter learns it the hard way: the most important, most surprising true thing goes first, not in paragraph six. Founders bury the lede constantly. They open with the founding year and the pedigree of the team, and the real news, the thing a stranger would actually repeat, sits three screens down. Finding the lede means deciding what matters most to the reader, not what flatters you most. They're rarely the same sentence.
Write the nut graf, or admit you don't have one
Newsrooms have a name for the paragraph that says why a story matters and why now: the nut graf. A piece without one reads like trivia, and most positioning never even attempts it. It lists features and hopes a thesis assembles itself in the reader's head.
If you can't write the nut graf, you don't have positioning. You have a product description.
Strong positioning says, in one breath, what changed in the world that makes this necessary now: the shift in cost or science or policy that turns a nice idea into an inevitable one. Write that sentence and everything else is support.
Show it, don't claim it
"Leading, innovative, trusted." Reporters are trained to distrust those words and dig for the evidence underneath. "Innovative" is a medal you pin on yourself. The specific thing you did that no one else had done is proof, and proof is the only version a skeptic accepts. So trade every adjective you're tempted to award yourself for the fact that earned it. Don't say "trusted." Say who trusts you, and with what. Let the reader reach "innovative" on her own; she'll believe it then, because she got there herself.
Kill your darlings
The oldest rule in editing is the most painful: cut the line you love if the piece doesn't need it. Companies fall for the messages that flatter them, the clever tagline and the sweeping claim and the slide that makes the room nod, and then build everything on lines that carry no weight. If a sentence survives because you're proud of it rather than because the reader needs it, it's a darling. Kill it.
Positioning written like marketing convinces no one but the people who wrote it. Positioning written like journalism, with the truest thing first, an honest "so what," evidence in place of adjectives, and nothing kept just because someone loved it, has a quality marketing can't fake: it sounds like a person telling you the truth. In a market fluent in being sold to, that's the rarest signal there is. It's also, not by accident, what makes a reporter pick up the phone.
That founder's homepage got a new first line: one sentence about cutting the test's cost by ninety percent. He told me later it was the first thing investors raised on every call. We didn't change the company. We just moved the lede upstairs.
— T.G.