Yipee! I'm a journalist.. Now all I need is a story

Finding stories is the main job of being a journalist whether you're working for a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV news channel or writing online.

So before you even begin to start researching a story or trying to figure out whether it'll make page 1 or page 21, it's fairly obvious that you're going to need to find something to report.

Just as you can't bake a cake without ingredients, you're not going to be able to write an article without an initial something that will make a story.

And this is when the fun stuff begins as you're going to have to do a bit of digging and snooping around to come up with something newsworthy.

Now don't confuse the term newsworthy with a story's news value. A newsworthy story is one that will be of interest to your readers, listeners or viewers whereas the news value of a story is more to do with the amount of words or airtime it gets and its positioning in the scheduling.

So how do journalists find stories?

Well, from all sorts of places is the quick answer! And below I've put together a brief list of the obvious sources and a few of the not so obvious too.

Also, if you keep checking my blog, I'll go through some of these in more detail in future posts as there's several that are worthy of a bit more explaining. But if I do that here this is going to end up being the size of War and Peace!

I'll also dig out some newspaper clippings from my old news stories to give you a better idea of how you can find stories from all kinds of places.

So here we go with that brief list and as I've said above, I'll add a bit more detail in posts to come, so keep checking.. 

• Press releases: this is a 'tool' used mainly by press officers working in public relations to alert the press to something that might be newsworthy to them. They are usually delivered via email to a journalist or newsroom or in the mail and are a simply a written note about what has happened, is happening or is being planned.

• Press conferences: this is a meeting usually called by a group or public body to get all interested members of the press in one room to deliver the news personally, in one hit. It is not a general meeting so usually doesn't include members of the public but can include reporters, photographers, camera crews and so forth.

• Public meetings: these can be anything from a council meeting or a general meeting called by a public authority, charity or group. Unlike a press conference that is solely for an audience of press, members of the public who have an interest in the meeting's agenda can attend a public meeting

• Court hearings: these include law courts that a journalist is allowed to cover under the law of the country or state governing that court.

• Emergency services: the police, fire and ambulance services are often a good source for news and each division usually has its own ways of informing the press about any calls or shouts that they've been on. When I worked as a small town reporter, the local police would let journalists call them direct or wander down to the cop shop to find out what had been happening the previous day/night. But in large city police stations this is something that might be done by the division's press officer (eg)

• Public notice boards: whether it be a church board or a notice board in a post office or outside a shop or shopping mall, if it's for the public to read then read it as you might find a good story sitting there among the notes about the date for the next local council meeting or a missing dog or cat

• Contacts: these are very important to get and to keep. A good contact is basically someone you can rely on to give you a nod in the right direction, throw you the odd 'exclusive' bit of news or gossip and basically be your eyes and ears when you're not around 

• Calls and emails: anyone who calls a newspaper or sends an email or letter about something that might be of interest

• Other media sources: always keep an eye on rival newspapers or other news media as they may have published or aired something that you could follow-up as a story or even find news out of something that they have missed eg, the death of a community leader that is sitting at the back of the paper as an obituary

• Local gossip: basically keep your eyes and ears open and don't be shy to listen in on other people's conversations when you're out and about or waiting in a queue at McDonald's for your Big Mac and fries!