ABSTRACT

Having found your story, you now need to find out if it is something worth writing about. No good story comes to a reporter fully formed. Only boring press releases seem to contain ready-made stories – and that’s only by the definition of the person who wrote it. The ubiquitous press release, indeed all story tips, should be scrutinised carefully to ensure they are not trying to disguise a story as something else. You need to discover the angle of the person selling you the story. All stories need to be checked out and sourced from elsewhere, with additional views added if needed. In order to produce good copy, reporters need to be able to trace a story back to its source. In practice, it is usually easier to have the sources and then work the story up from them. For this reason, a reporter is highly reliant on the sources that he or she cultivates. The wider the sources, the more you’ll know – and the more you know, the better the stories.