Reporting

By Christopher B. Daly and Leighton Walter Kille

Nonprofit organizations perform some of the most vital work in the United States, often serving the needy and filling gaps where society does not, or cannot, deliver services or provide safety nets.

So you’re on deadline with breaking news about a crime committed in your community but officials are releasing only basic details: a few facts about the crime and the name and birth date of a person alleged to be involved. Your audience – and your editor – are demanding to know as much about this individual as possible, as quickly as possible. What do you do? How do you report on someone when you have so little information?

So the city you cover is considering raising property taxes and your editor wants a story today. If you’re like many journalists, you didn’t get a lot of training in college on municipal budgets. Where do you begin? We’re here to give you some pointers.

Writing about property taxes, a main revenue source for local government, can be complicated. But we can get started by asking these three questions:

David Carr, media critic for the New York Times and one of the nation’s best-known voices on trends in news, technology and entertainment, died February 12, 2015. He was 58.

Here at Journalist’s Resource, we love research. Early in our careers, however, we as individual journalists didn’t always appreciate the value of research or interpret it correctly. We did not always use the best study to make a point or fact-check a claim. Learn from our mistakes. Here are some things we wish we knew years ago.

1. Academic research is one of the best reporting tools around.

The intersection of knowledge and narrative, of informed journalism, is the heart of what the Journalist’s Resource project continues to explore. In the short essay below, Nicholas Lemann, a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, articulates a method for journalism that integrates knowledge while preserving the art of storytelling. We reprint it here with his permission:

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