JRN 400: The Journalstic Method

One of you guys sent me a digital story package draft to review, along with this note:

I have attached a Word document with my ideas for the Digital Story Package. My thoughts are still all over the place with research and writing because I haven't gotten all of my interviews yet, but the one I did get is really good, so I may use that interview as my main piece in the story. My other interviews are coming soon. The rest of the information, like data, charts, ASF, and stand alone pictures, will be in the written section of my package below my video.

The draft had a nice range of named, listed direct sources hitting all sorts of source categories as described in an earlier blog post: involved sources, subject drivers, neutral experts, documentary sources and such. Here is what I wrote back:

I think this is an excellent start. Very nice range of sources and good sources for data. Don't worry that you don't have focus yet; in journalism we want focus to come from doing thorough interviews look at your subject generally and then once you finish asking yourself, what did I discover? What you discovered through reporting (not simply what you presumed at the start of reporting) should be the angle taken. I think with the net you've cast I think you're well on your way to discovering something. Thanks!  

The journalistic method of doing interviews and such is directly borrowed by the scientific method. You may not be familiar with that term but you do know what I'm talking about. It's the idea that a scientist starts with a theory, and the does experiments to test the theory and see if it's true and then in the end the scientist emphasizes what experiments proved or disproved, regardless of whether it exactly matches the original theory. They follow the evidence and then conclude whatever they ended up discovering.

That's what we do in journalism. Our original story idea is our theory; doing interviews and our experiments. Then, after we do interviews we see what we have. If at that point the facts are taking you beyond what you originally expected, that's good! Journalism should be about discovery; either discovering a hidden truth or making greater sense of things that are known.

Either way, we need to find something new. The root word of news is new, and that is no accident.