What you should be looking for

You start with the basics of who, what, where, when, how and why – but you don’t stop there. What is needed above all is the detail and anecdote that illuminate the basics. This extra information is what generally makes the difference between an ordinary version of the story and a good one. Just take any big story on any given day and examine different accounts in different papers. It will be the richness of some compared with others that strikes you.

52 THE uNIvERsAL JouRNALIsT

Detail

Collecting detail is crucial to good research. If you are reporting an incident you need to build up a detailed chronology of what happened, so that you can run a ‘video’ of it in your head. It can never be as complete as frame-by-frame, but that should be your aim. You will not use all of these details, but, until you come to write the story, you never know which are the telling ones. Almost no detail is too small to collect, for even the tiniest fragments can add worth to the story far beyond their nominal weight. An account of a murder, for example, can say that it was committed in the countryside and even name the date of 1 May. But if you report that it was committed at sunnybank Farm on May Day, it immediately becomes more evocative and powerful. Better still, get to the scene and describe it – the cottage garden where the weapon was found (abandoned by the runner beans), the pink walls of the kitchen, the flowers in the jamjar by the backdoor, etc., etc. on many occasions, sections of the report, or even the whole thing, can be hung on even the smallest detail. And the details that are most valuable are the unexpected ones, either the apt or the particularly incongruous.

In some ways, and in a lot of cases, the detail is the story. For instance, a body has been found in a public park, but police have no idea about its identity, and can’t tell the cause of death yet. With no more facts than the name of the park, and the gender, approximate age, and obvious features of the body, it’s not much more than a paragraph or so. But with some assiduous questioning, the story can become something more. What was the victim wearing? How tall? Any birthmarks? What was in his or her pockets? Any tattoos? Did he or she wear a watch? Did it have an inscription? Any prescription medicines found in their pockets? Was there a wallet? What state were the shoes in? Any make-up worn? Was this in any way distinctive? The potential questions are almost limitless. And some answers to such questions will not only make a potentially intriguing mystery story, it may also produce results. In June 1983, Edna Buchanan, crime correspondent of the Miami Herald, began a story: ‘He wore a flower tattoo on his shoulder and he died violently. That is all police know about a man whose murder they are trying to solve.’ Five weeks later she was reporting: ‘The unknown tattooed man, dumped by his killer into a drainage ditch just off a rutted and remote dirt road, had been identified by relatives who recognized a newspaper description of the intricate flower design on his right shoulder.’

Detail is especially valuable when you are writing a report, or news feature, after the basic story has been around for a day or so. The great Bill Connor (‘Cassandra’ of the Daily Mirror) once based the opening of his piece about the death of stalin, written several days after the event, on the detail that the old monster who had sent so many of his fellow- Russians to a premature death, died in his bed at the age of 73, ‘between the comfort of his sheets’.

REsEARCH 53

Anecdote

The same applies to anecdotes and examples. They should not be long (otherwise they will overwhelm the main thrust of the story) and indeed the best kind of anecdotes in news reports are often incidents or episodes summarised in one or two sentences. A story about an eccentric decision by the council of a small town is going to be a lot more lively if you can include some tales from its past. They may be not much more than a brief incident or two from history, mention of a couple of the town’s most famous natives, or even something as simple as an inscription on a grave in a local churchyard. But you can be sure they will be a lot more interesting and informative than the predictable quotations from one of the protagonists that would otherwise take their place.

Background

This is something you should collect for any story, even the briefest ones. You should be looking for the setting, context and relevant parts of the history of the subject or issue. It might be a paragraph or two of ‘the story so far’, or a potted history of the subject or issue. It might even be some wider analogy or comparison. A story about attempts by your country or city to limit car use in cities, for example, will be all the better for some idea of what policies have been adopted (and what worked and did not) in other places or countries. News stories are rarely unique eruptions of fate; they belong in a continuum.

Perspective

Context can sometimes be the vital part of the story, putting facts or developments into a proper, even far less dramatic, perspective. This is particularly vital where someone is issuing blood-curdling warnings about health or public safety. stories about health risks in the environment, for example, can often be preposterously overstated unless some perspective is given. Would you think it a good story that a sample of sea water contained 6, 000 molecules of poison? You might be thinking front page until you learnt that this is what would be produced if you took a pint of poison and tipped it evenly into the world’s oceans. And many stories about the dangers of pesticides might be a little more intelligent and accurate if they also compared the risks to the amount of naturally occurring pesticidal chemicals found in basil, peanuts and mushrooms.

There are journalists who think it is our job to dramatise everything, but a little reflection will tell you this is a fairly dumb route to take. Think how we react to the people in our own lives who always put the most melodramatic construction on everything. In the end we regard

54 THE uNIvERsAL JouRNALIsT

them as gullible, unreliable and a pain in the butt. Why should readers think differently of us if we omit context and perspective to ham up every story?