When you cover a social issues beat, part of your job is not only to write or
produce the most obvious stories but also to come up with interesting ideas or
angles that haven’t been covered yet. In fact, if you’re doing your job well,
you should be able to think of many more story possibilities than you could possibly have time to do.
Some editors assign stories that they’ve thought of themselves. Most also like
it when reporters propose their own ideas -- and it’s usually better for you
to do a story you like than one that someone forced on you. After all, it is
the reporter’s job to stay in touch with sources, experts and others involved
with the beat. And such contact, more often than not, is how story ideas
The longer you cover a beat, the easier story ideas will come. You will
understand better what should be considered news, why it is important or
significant, and whom you should call to get more information. You will learn
which sources to trust and which to treat with greater skepticism, which are
interested in getting information out and which are only interested in getting
their side of the story out and suppressing others.
Let’s say you have been assigned to cover the growing problem in your country
of trafficking in humans, many of whom are women taken from one country to
another and forced to work as sex slaves. You know some of the obvious
stories: How does the trafficking network operate? What is your government
doing to stop trafficking? What is life like for women who are trafficked?
But a good reporter would want to go beyond these stories to explore facets of
the problem that have not been reported. Here are some ideas, courtesy of
journalism trainer Carolyn Robinson, that show how the problem impacts more
than just the lives of individual victims. Nearly any other social issues
topic will have a similar wealth of untapped story ideas.
• Business: What do traffickers do with their profits?
• Health: How is the health care system fighting the problem?
• Education: What are schools doing to educate young people about this
problem and prevent young people from becoming victims?
• Religion and Society: What are religious institutions doing about the
problem?
• Science and Technology: What new scientific or technological methods
are being used to fight trafficking?
• Politics: Have any political groups or parties joined together in the
fight against trafficking?
• International Relations: What international laws prevent trafficking
and how much effort are other countries putting into enforcing those laws?
• Labor: What industries use trafficked people other than sex-for-hire
businesses? What are labor unions or businesses doing?
• Transportation: How do traffickers transport their victims?
• Crime and Justice: How do people become traffickers? What are their
motives?
Story ideas can come from anywhere. Many spin off beat coverage or an ongoing
story, like the one we talked about above. Some can come from random
observations on your part or stories you’ve seen that you think might have
more behind them. Many reporters develop “tickler” files, which hold dates of
upcoming events on your beat or story leads that they don’t have to follow up
on right away. One leading U.S. editor encouraged his reporters to carry two
notebooks with them at all times – one for the story they were working on at
the time, the second to jot down story ideas or keep notes on issues that
might develop into stories later one. Reporters refer to this as “collecting
bits of string” that can be assembled at a later date.
Probably the best place to get story ideas is just from talking to people on
your beat and the people you interview for your stories. Ask them what they’re
interested in, what they think needs to be covered, and take it from there. If
you’re really stumped for story ideas, let yourself daydream for a minute. Go
back through your old stories and see what you missed, or engage in exercises
like “brainstorming” or “mind-mapping,” by yourself or in a group. While those
are more often used for problem-solving, they can be helpful in stirring up
ideas.
Many story ideas come from tips, either from a source or from an affected
person. While these need to be checked out, rigorously, before you can present
them for news, they have the advantage of coming from someone who’s already
familiar with the issue you will be reporting on. A remarkable example of such
a story was the Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Washington Post on the
shabby treatment of Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center,
which is supposed to be one of the premier military hospitals in the United
States. Those stories did not come from a press release or from official
sources – it came as a tip from a friend of a friend of one of the reporters
on the story.
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