Chapter 2 – Finding the Story

Where do investigative reporters find stories, and how can you train yourself to spot them wherever you are? Investigative projects often start from a small kernel of an idea. You can get ideas for these stories by observing people and events that occur around you. Stories may also come out of gossip tips, but you need to listen for them and follow up on them. Investigative reporters scan the briefs, spot the unasked questions in daily newspaper stories and zero in on mundane references in press releases and government documents. They look for problems that might be more widespread than reported and connections between seemingly unrelated events.

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Exercises

Look for the possible investigative stories in your daily life and community

  1. Find a story in a local newspaper about a problem in the community. How might it be part of a wider trend? See if the news story asked the following questions:
    1. Why did it happen?
    2. What would have prevented it from happening?
    3. Were there other instances of similar problems?
    4. Is there a government agency or laws in place to prevent it from happening or to punish those responsible? If so, are they being enforced?
  2. Try to come up with an idea for an investigation based on the story you read in Exercise 1. What will you investigate? What do you think you might find?
  3. Scan the news briefs in your local paper. See if you can take each one and turn what was a reactive story into an idea for a proactive investigation. What issue or issues do you see that you could look into? How would you take a proactive approach to reporting the story?
  4. Pick one day out of your week to visit different places around town. Try to find an investigative story out of what you notice in the course of the day. Keep your eyes and ears open for something that might cause people problems, for complaints people have, for accidents waiting to happen, for anything that might cause a danger to public health and safety or that might lead to violations of equality and justice. What is it that sparked your curiosity? What problem do you suspect might be happening? How might you investigate it further?

Big Story Steps

Narrowing your topic and starting your preliminary research

  1. 2.1 Beginning with the narrow topic you selected in Chapter 1, select one problem to look into. What major questions come to mind that need to be answered? What might be the challenges involved in carrying out these investigations? Why might this story be important?
  2. 2.2 If you will be doing the investigation as a group project, then as a group compare the story ideas and pick one to work on.
  3. 2.3 See if you can synthesize the story idea down to a statement of 30 words or less that summarizes what you hope or expect to find.
  4. 2.4 Start your preliminary research by doing a basic online search of your topic.
    1. Try to find blogs in which people discuss issues events or issues related to your topic.
    2. Try to find academic studies that examine your topic.
    3. Using a news search engine, try to find news stories related to your topic.