The Reporter's Craft: How News Gets Found, Checked, and Told

Newsworthiness is a weighing of six values — impact, timeliness, proximity, prominence, conflict, and novelty — and the more of them a fact carries, the stronger its claim on the reader's limited attention.

A topic becomes a story only when narrowed to one specific, answerable question — what exactly happened, who says so, and how do they know — and every reporting task that follows is a step toward answering it.

A primary source witnessed the event or produced the record itself, a secondary source repeats what a primary source said, and each step of retelling adds distance in which error and spin can enter — so a reporter always works back toward the firsthand.

On the record, on background, and off the record are terms negotiated before information changes hands — never retroactively — and a promise of confidentiality, once given, binds the reporter even at personal and legal cost, because sources risk livelihoods on it.

Public records do not misremember or change their story, and the records request that gets answered names a specific record, a narrow date range, and the office that holds it.

A beat is a territory covered continuously — sources cultivated before you need them, meetings attended when nothing seems to happen, documents read routinely — so that stories surface as departures from a baseline only the beat reporter knows.

An interview is designed before it is held: research the subject until your questions prove it, script open-ended questions, and order them easy to hard — the hardest held for the end.

The most valuable interview question is the unscripted one — heard into existence by listening for evasion, vagueness, jargon, and surprise, then pinned down with “what specifically do you mean” and “how do you know that.”

Quotation marks promise the reader these exact words were said, in this fair context; paraphrase carries the meaning in your own words, and attribution names who stands behind every fact you did not witness.

A claim is verified when independent sources confirm it — accounts that trace back to the same origin count as one — and a self-authenticating document can outweigh several voices, which is when the two-source rule honestly admits one is enough.

A raw count grows with population while a rate does not, so honest comparison across cities, eras, or groups divides by population — and percent change on a small base makes tiny changes sound enormous.

Whether an image, clip, or viral claim is publishable turns on its provenance — original poster, earliest appearance, true date and location — and provenance is established by searching outward from the artifact, never by staring harder at it.

A published error spreads as other outlets copy it, so a correction must be prompt, prominent, and specific — stating what was wrong, what is true, and how it happened.

The lede delivers the story's single most newsworthy fact in one clear sentence — under 35 words, active voice, no warm-up.

News facts are ordered by news value, most important first, with a nut graf saying why the story matters — so the piece survives being cut from the bottom and a reader who stops after any paragraph still leaves with the essentials.

The SPJ code names four duties — seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, be accountable and transparent — and newsroom ethics is the discipline of deciding which duty yields when they collide.