HOW TO FIND GOOD STORY IDEAS
We can make finding good story ideas so much harder than it really should be. So often, we are looking for the spectacular and the obvious, when many great stories are hidden in plain sight, if only we would be curious and then act upon that curiosity.
Case in point: not long ago a documentary filmmaker found a sensational topic that led to an award-winning movie: seven immigrant brothers,essentially living and growing up locked into a small New York City apartment.
The documentarian didn’t find the topic by Googling it or from having super-secret sources leak their whereabouts to her. It was much simpler than that: she wandered NYC’s streets looking for something interesting, and then when she found something she got nosy. From The New York Times:
Ms. Moselle said she first met the brothers in 2010 as they walked “in a pack” down First Avenue. All of them were wearing black Ray-Ban sunglasses inspired by “Reservoir Dogs,” and their long hair was blowing in the wind. “I just started running after them to find out more and was instantly obsessed,” she said.
That form of story-finding doesn’t have a formal name, but what I call it is …
>>> ENVIRONMENTAL OBSERVATION. What do you notice when going around
your community? What things do you come across that makes you stop and stare or wonder or ask a question? What makes you go “wow!” or “WTF?” or “huh?”
For example, some time back a reporter from The State News was at a basketball game as a fan, and noticed there was some odd-looking guy mimicking the band director as the band played during breaks in play. Instead of just moving on, the reporter decided to try and find out what this person’s deal was.
The reporter ended up getting a great story about this person with Down syndrome who became an unofficial leader of the Spartan brassband, which empowered the audience in two ways: if you never noticed him, you had someone to look for. And if you did notice him, now you knew the back story.
Environmental observation is a great way to come up with story ideas that are original and organic, and to which the audience can actually relate. It takes things in the day-to-day world they actually inhabit and puts a spotlight on it.
>>> WHAT ARE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT? When you are having lunch with friends or when you are on the bus or when you are at a party, what are people talking about? Complaining about? Worrying about? What do they look forward to, or dread? Often, these are great trends and issues to further explore.
To cite another piece of student journalist work, a few years back everyone seemed to be talking about “friends with benefits.” Is it a good thing or not? How did it go for people who tried this? One State News reporter turned that talk into a trend story, further investigating the issueand combing anecdotal examples with scholarly research on the subject.
This technique allows us to identify which trends and issues are relevant in people’s lives, and that’s no small thing. Journalism needs to connect with the audience to be successful, and while we can’t always necessarily be interesting, we can always be relevant and useful to our audience by reporting on things that matter in how their lives actually play out.
We can stimulate this process by quizzing people around us. It can help to ask leading questions. You ask an MSU student the simple question of what’s going on around campus or what news they want to read about, they may look at you and simply shrug. You ask one what ticks them off, and they’re far more likely to give you a laundry list of topics – parking! MIPs! Textbook prices! – that can give you good direction.
>>> WHAT ARE PEOPLE ACTING UPON? Based on looking at the day-to-day lives of people around you – friends, acquaintances, coworkers, peers, grown-ups, everybody – what are people needing to do? And can anticipating what is ahead of their life paths help us identify story ideas on trends and issue they will soon be facing, or need to be aware of ahead of time?
Let’s say your target audience consists of college students. Thinking of topics they will be acting upon includes looking for internships for the summer and jobs after graduation; paying back student loans; getting used to post-graduate lives without much free time, and so forth.
>>> WHAT DO THE EXPERTS KNOW? Every field has an endless amount of professionals that spend their whole careers delving into topics at which we are novice. Tapping into their insights can help us discover trends and issues from a more researched perspective.
For example, of you’re a police reporter you may regularly check in with the police chief to ask what’s new. You may keep several beat cops as sources to see if they’re noticing anything new on the street level. A university criminology professor may be someone you visit every now and then to see what trends they are picking up on. You may make a habit of checking the Web for articles from news organizations and think tanks and universities on crime to see what’s new.
>>> WHAT DOES DATA TELL US? Data can help us visualize trends that we can then start asking people about to get explanations as to why a trend or issue is happening. Numbers create questions that then lead us to look for answers, which with we populate a story.
For example, let’s consider a very basic document – our debit card statements. Looking at it could tell me a lot about what you’re going through these days and what your immediate priorities are and how they’ve shifted simply by looking at what you’re spending your money on. (Why so much on booze lately? You’re spending a lot less on books this year than last; why is that? What was that urgent care charge last month about?)
Finding and looking at budgets and studies and surveys and spending patterns and such can help us not only make sense of issues we know about, but discover issues we didn’t even know existed.
Plus, the U.S. Census is a treasure trove of facts about a community -- how many people work out-of-town? What is the average commute? How many people have cable TV? -- in addition to the questions about race and wealth and such that can lead to trend stories.
>>> ALL OF THESE APPROACHES SHARE ONE COMMONALITY: we find and develop story ideas by tapping into the eyes, ears and brains of various perspectives onto the world: everyday people and expert personalities; looking at numbers and looking down the road, etc. It’s looking at our target community from various perspectives, and trying to put ourselves in the shoes of as many others as possible to see what they see.
Being a reporter looking for story ideas is like being a sports scout looking for the next superstar: the more eyes and ears you have helping you, the more you’ll find and the better you’ll do. This is no different. In journalism, we write or shoot or blog or whatever based on what we find, so we need to cast a wide net at ground level.
>>> DON’T JUST GOOGLE FOR IDEAS. While Googling is a good way to find experts and data, for example, it’s a terrible way to find story ideas in general. That’s because if we can Google for a story idea, so can our audience. And if the topic is something they can already find out about on their own, then why would they need us?
The role of a journalist has always been to discover and share what people can’t discover for themselves, and to make sense of what people already know. The age of the search engine has raised the bar for us as journalists, so we need to concentrate on finding what our audience has neither the time nor ability to do themselves.
And quite often, that simply means we need to be curious, and then act on our curiosity.
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