Speaker 1: Chapter 1, Finding the Story Now we can all agree on the fact that journalists are not supposed to invent stories, because that would make us storytellers now, wouldn't it? However, there are reporters who will report on certain occasions that happen in town. For instance, a fire, a special town hall meeting, maybe a cultural or sporting event that they can report on. But journalistic inquiry is different. Firstly, it often starts with a question that you have, maybe something that you've always wondered about. Vague suspicions, distant possibilities, likely events, or even possible causes. But you, the journalist, is the one who finds the story. You dig deep, you research, and you report. Now the good thing is, is that anything can qualify for an investigation. You will know how you want to spend your trouble, your time, and your energy on that topic. So you will choose a topic that is fit for you. A very important tip is that being original and efficient will have the newsroom eating out of your hand, and your editor will be very, very proud of you. Let your stories be important, entertaining, and revealing at the same time, and people will want to read everything you write. Choosing the story starts with evaluating possible topics, and you will then choose which one best suits you. Good and effective approaches to finding a story are the following. Start with the people around you, your neighbours, your friends. Maybe you listen in on a conversation at a bus stop. Maybe somebody tells you a political joke. Speak with regular sources. Attend lectures, court hearings. Make people know that you are interested. Perhaps you want to tour certain facilities in your district. Find out about what's happening around you. Use breaking stories. Find some newspaper clippings of stories that are a little bit older. Maybe the reporter did not have time to ask certain questions that you have. Maybe there are certain angles that have not been covered. Keep reading. This is very important. Read other stories. Read books. Read the newspapers, of course. Read signs, commercials, maybe even ingredient labels on different products. There is a story, and there are questions to find in everything. Keep your eyes and ears and your nose open and observe. Now, maybe you will be walking through town. Take out your earphones or take off your headphones. Really observe your surroundings. Listen to everything. Maybe there's something suspicious that you can write on. Maybe you will take a different path to work today or tomorrow. Maybe you will find something there that can inspire you. Check back on issues that other reporters or you have reported on before. Maybe a certain law was passed that has now affected the people. Follow up on that. Use the internet. Now, of course, the internet holds a great deal of information, and you have access to this information. When you find the information, make sure to double check with another site. Perhaps you can compare the different kinds of information you find. Check on the trends hotly debated on internet platforms. Social media, of course, is a great way of finding information on how the people around you tick. Maybe attend certain events. Go on to certain discussion forums. See what is hot and trendy at the moment and what is on people's minds. Consider adapting a story that has been done elsewhere. So maybe we look at the new education system in Finland. How would that kind of system work in your own city or your own country? Would it? Well, then why? Try to think of what is not in the news. Now, the news, of course, bombards us with a whole lot of information, and getting a finished product mailed to you, well, that will probably only happen in your dreams. So try to investigate the questions behind the news. Now, this, of course, goes to show that we as journalists do not sit around and wait for the topics to find us. It is our job to go and look for the topics ourselves, but that is part of the fun, of course. You've got the possibility of inventing your own topics and investigate to your own journalistic heart's desire. So let's talk about what is a good topic. Now that we've gone into full story search idea mode, here are some tricks that can help you identify a good topic for research. Now, you all know this. When you watch a movie, you listen to a story, you read a book, you watch a documentary. At the heart of most of these things is a person or are the people. So most genuine stories are about people, what they experience, how the developments around them affect them. So a good story should always have people in it, preferably in the classic storybook telling sense. The perpetrators, the victims, the doers, the witnesses, the decision makers and the influencers. It's preferable to investigate the story rather than criticising the systems or the facilities. It is preferable to investigate the things, not the systems, but people who are responsible for them, people who suffer and people who benefit. For instance, a little boy who is fatally neglected in a nursing home and a carer who is trying to uncover that. So instead of criticising the system or the failing system, we look at how it affects the people. Now, the underlying story is the same, but it's packaged a little bit differently. When approaching your editor with a pitch, make sure to pitch it as a story that is about people. A good story should always affect many people. How about pollution in your neighbourhood or the pollution of your favourite beach? Now, if it affects many people, it will get your community and your editor fired up as well. Look at issues and processes that don't go the way they should. A theatre that is taking ages to finish will not be great news for you. Everybody will be reporting on it. Rather, look into your direct surroundings, maybe your kid's school, maybe the shop around the corner. What do these people have to say? Find things that interest you and maybe affect you as well that will give you a perfect connection to them. Reporters often shy away from being biased, but believe me, as long as your story is transparent and based on hard, good evidence, you have enough argumentation against any kind of prejudice. Use conflict, abuse of power, fraud, integrity issues, these kind of problems really make for a great storytelling technique. Also, it will give you two sides to the discussion and this means that a debate is going on. That means there is a lot of documentation for you to use. Now that you've found your perfect topic, it's time for the feasibility scan. But what is a feasibility scan? In chapter two, we'll approach a methodological system to researching a topic. So now we do a quick feasibility scan where we want to find the answers to certain questions. Number one, can we actually investigate this topic? Good question, right? Well, firstly, are there records, sources or documents that we can use? If not, there's not much left, is there? So at the beginning, write down all the possible records and sources that you think you can use, even if some of them aren't quite realistic. Make sure you've thought about them at least. Number two, has the topic been covered before? While this is not necessarily a problem, we are in the news business after all. So have your story contain news, please. That is very important. A quick online check will rule out any repetition. Number three, is someone else investigating the story as well? Now, don't be bothered by this because you might have different angles, different sources, different documents. Is someone else investigating the same issue as well at the moment? Now, don't be discouraged by this if someone really is doing so. You might have different angles, different viewpoints, different documentation, different evidence to support your hypothesis. Number three, is someone else investigating the story at the same time? Well, don't be discouraged if that is the case because you might have different angles, different viewpoints, different documentation, resources or evidence to support your hypothesis. This also provides the possibility of a possible cooperation with the other journalists. Never be discouraged by this. Strengthen your own argumentation with hard-hitting evidence. Number four, roughly estimate the size of the project. How much time will you really need? Be realistic about this. Our editor will love us if we don't over or underestimate ourselves too much. Number five, do we have the knowledge, the time and the people to properly investigate? Now, this investigation is quite a big thing. Sometimes you can't work alone. Sometimes you will need help. You'll need assistance. Maybe you will approach people who are experts in their certain fields that will help you. Maybe you need to data crunch. These are all aspects that need to be taken into consideration as well. Number six, as journalists, we are obligated to present nothing but the truth. Now, that is all very well, but this might have repercussions on our publishing medium because we must understand journalistic investigation is quite risky at times. Maybe we'll be uncovering the fraud of a big company. Well, they won't be too happy about that, will they? We must understand these risks. We must calculate them and then present them to our editor with our pitch. We're now making our way towards an elevator pitch. So, we've found our topic, we've answered all the questions and it's now time to approach the editor. If you're a freelancer, you will build a pitch and present it to the medium that is best suited for publishing your story. Before we can do that, I'm going to ask you to take a little step back and narrow down your inquiry one little bit more. We want to focus on one specific aspect that is common to all facets of our inquiry. Here's an example. When Pulitzer Prize winner David Barstow of the New York Times investigated the Iraqi weapons, he realised that this topic would be tremendous. There are so many kinds of weapons, nuclear, chemical. So, he decided to concentrate on the aluminium lining that is common to all of these weapons. He said that this would allow to target the reporting more easily by asking more focused questions and bringing in the needed complexity into a tight little frame. In Chapter 2, as part of our methodological approach, we will rephrase our inquiry into one strong research hypothesis. This is proven to keep investigations more focused and efficient as well. This method is called story-based inquiry. For now, we're going to turn our topic into one or two sharply phrased questions. Number one, what is it exactly that we want to know? Number two, how and why did something happen and why did it happen in the way that it did? As you can see, there are several steps towards finding the perfect story. Lots of questions that need to be answered. But now we found the topic, we started our questions for the inquiry, we can broadly estimate the time that we'll need for the inquiry. With that information, we are now ready to approach our pitch and hope that it resonates with our editor and then our audience.