Making Succinct, Newsworthy Stories

I have found that another challenge in writing stories for me is cutting down the material I have collected into a short, succinct newsworthy story.  Indeed, often I get lots of really interesting quotes from my sources, so, when I sit down to write the story, it is difficult to cut out parts in order to get down to the juicy center, so to speak.  For example, this week I wrote my article about a lecture given by Jonathan Rosa and I recorded the whole talk while taking notes.  I came out of the talk completely amazed by all of what Rosa had said about Latino identities in America, so it was really tough to cut down his quotes to just the ones that illustrated his main points and connected the best to the narrative of my story.  While I believe as journalists we have every right to write long stories in order to produce a complete narrative, we also don't want to bore our readers and that probably would have happened if I had plopped too many quotes by Rosa into my story.  I think its tough to find this balance between too much information and too little, but it's a skill that I've been practicing this semester and that I believe can be seen in my article, which illustrates many of his points in without being superfluous.