Writing

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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Far from being recent acquaintances, mass journalism and high technology have long been inseparable companions. When the London Times installed the first steam-powered presses in 1814, they not only quadrupled the speed of page production, they also vastly increased the paper’s reach and power. Later advances such as cameras, telegraphs and telephones — to say nothing of computers large and small — only deepened the relationship between the press and technology.

The Internet is an endlessly rich world of sites, pages and posts — until it all ends with a click and a “404 page not found” error message. While the hyperlink was conceived in the 1960s, it came into its own with the HTML protocol in 1991, and there’s no doubt that the first broken link soon followed.

Writing about the economy has to involve numbers, but it doesn’t have to be deadly dull. While the numbers are the story, a good economic journalist uses real-life examples to make those numbers come alive. Find people that are experiencing the trend that the numbers are showing, and you will do your readers a service.