All news stories start with an idea, but then what? How do you gather information?
The procedure is not complicated but it can be demanding.
- First, look for background information. Has your organization or any others covered this before? Use that to help form your questions.
- Secondly, take your questions to sources — people who know about the issue. If it’s a complex issue, start from the outside and work your way in. For example, you might talk with the mayor’s staff assistant before you interview the mayor.
- Third, test the underlying theme or theory of your story during the reporting process. It might be a simple theory – City Council is going to do something important tonight — or it might be a more complicated.
- If your theory turns out to be wrong, that’s good. Under the SPJ Code of Ethics, a journalist’s duty is to seek the truth, not buttress ideologies. It’s far better to check the facts and make corrections before publishing or broadcasting a news story.
One of the best introductions to reporting is “Getting the Story” — a training video produced by the International Center for Foreign Journalists. The video takes us all the way through the process — from the reporter’s assignment through his work interviewing people, then writing the story, then editing and working with editors in the publication process. Getting the story also has a workbook at this location.
In Getting the Story, you’ll notice that reporters take busses, use typewriters, and don’t have cell phones, but even so, the process is much the same as today. Also note that the editor in the video is the much-admired Tewfik Mishlawi, a Wall Street Journal reporter and editor from Lebanon who died in 2012.
| Another video about reporting, Gathering Sources, is from the International Journalists Network. |