With tight deadlines and short attention spans, it’s important to tell compelling stories quickly and concisely. In this video lesson, Poynter’s Al Tompkins will teach you how to make the toughest job easier — finding your story’s focus.

Learn how you can take complex issues and create easy-to-understand, compelling stories. Using examples from news stories and commercials, you’ll see how a three-word guideline can help you tell sharp, focused stories.

Once you learn this technique, you’ll gather more of what you need and waste less time gathering information you will never use. And you’ll be able to take a single story and tell different angles for different platforms.