Journalism of Ideas

Brainstorming, Developing, and Selling Stories in the Digital Age

Daniel Reimold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136206283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Periodismo

Journalism of Ideas is a comprehensive field guide for brainstorming, discovering, reporting, digitizing, and pitching news, opinion, and feature stories within journalism 2.0. With on-the-job advice from professional journalists, activities to sharpen your multimedia reporting skills, and dozens of story ideas ripe for adaptation, Dan Reimold helps you develop the journalistic know-how that will set you apart at your campus media outlet and beyond.

The exercises, observations, anecdotes, and tips in this book cover every stage of the story planning and development process, including how news judgment, multimedia engagement, records and archival searches, and various observational techniques can take your reporting to the next level. Separate advice focuses on the storytelling methods involved in data journalism, photojournalism, crime reporting, investigative journalism, and commentary writing. In addition to these tricks of the trade, Journalism of Ideas features an extensive set of newsworthy, timely, and unorthodox story ideas to jumpstart your creativity. The conversation continues on the author's blog, College Media Matters.

Reimold also shows students how to successfully launch a career in journalism: the ins and outs of pitching stories, getting your work published, and navigating the post-graduation job search. Related sections of the book highlight the art of freelancing 2.0, starting an independent site, blogging, constructing quality online portfolios, securing internships, and building a social media following.

CHAPTER 1

The Idea Stage

“I saw stories everywhere. At dinner parties, I would leave with two or three story ideas. Every phone conversation, every movie or play, every walk down the street or trip on the subway brimmed with possibilities. I wrote down every idea that occurred to me, on scraps of paper that I stuffed into my jacket pockets. When I arrived at the office, I would empty my overflowing pockets and sort through the scraps.”

Arthur Gelb, former New York Times managing editor,
reflecting on his days as deputy metro editor

In space, astronauts occasionally hover around a kitchen table.

There is no practical need for a table in a spacecraft. In fact, in a zero gravity environment, a table doesn't make any sense at all. But NASA engineers found astronauts missed having the equivalent of a kitchen or dining room table in their space habitation modules (“the box where the crew lives”).

Their longing wasn't really for the table. It was for the comfort and familiarity the table brought—part of a larger yearning for at least some semblance of home while in orbit. “We're humans,” said science writer Mary Roach. “Human beings want to sit around a table and gossip and talk about stuff and eat and drink.”

So a table was permanently added into the shuttle design scheme—simply to keep the astronauts happy.

This is one of the hundreds of “takeaway facts” shared over the past two-and-a-half years on 99% Invisible (99percentinvisible.org). Hosted and produced by Roman Mars, the self-described “tiny radio show” has gained a massive, impassioned following. It tells stories and shares a smorgasbord of “discoveries that make you stop and re-examine the objects you see and touch every day”—from toothbrushes, stamps, and steering wheels to escalators, airports, and the Teddy bear.

While branded upfront as a program on architecture and design, Mars declares his true central focus is “the 99 percent invisible activity that shapes our world.” Basically, he explores concepts and things that don't scream newsworthy, but still greatly influence or interact with many aspects of our daily lives.

For example, in an episode last May, Mars looked into queue theory, the study of how we wait in lines. Think it has nothing to do with you?

Consider how often you sit in traffic, wait for an elevator, choose a check-out aisle at the grocery store, head to a fast food drive-thru, get placed on a course wait-list or stand in line at the bank, the ballpark, the airport, the movie theater, or even the happiest place on Earth.

Among other facts, Mars discovered nearly 20 employees at Disney work solely to ensure visitors to its theme parks remain entertained and satisfied while waiting in line for shows and rides. As an expert at MIT nicknamed Dr. Queue tells him, “They have mastered the idea that people can be happy waiting 40 minutes in line for a four-minute ride.”

Each episode of 99% Invisible is a four-to-15-minute ride that airs on a radio station in San Francisco and as a podcast. It typically contains one big idea, an interesting “takeaway fact,” two or three anecdotes, and “a person exhibiting geeky enthusiasm.” (See Dr. Queue.) After the reporting for each episode is complete, Mars spends roughly two days mixing and editing—often at night after putting his kids to bed.

This formula has rocketed the show to an almost-unparalleled stratosphere of success. It has earned awards, enormous praise from radio industry veterans, a super-high iTunes podcast ranking, and a rabid fan-base known as The Invisiblers. Last summer, a fundraising campaign on the website Kickstarter brought in more than $170,000—the most money pledged for a journalism project in Kickstarter's history.

99% Invisible is the epitome of new journalism. It is a terrestrial–online hybrid. It is independently produced, from home. It is crowdfunded, and at times crowdsourced. And it presents episodes and extras that can be listened to, read, viewed, downloaded, shared, and commented upon.

Yet, beyond all the innovation, the most visible element of its success is simple—and old school. As one writer explains, “[I]t tells the types of stories that you can't wait to share with someone else.”

“Stories are super satisfying,” said Mars. “I think that narratives are what you naturally do in your brain … Tapping into that is important … There's a little bit of voodoo in the magic of it. Everyone wants to be a storyteller … It makes you feel like you're doing something important. Because stories are so important.”

■ Over the past decade, digital tools and platforms have rocketed journalism to a universe of innovation, interactivity, and immediacy once unimaginable. Yet, without stellar content, journalism 2.0 is not worth the effort to read, watch, listen, contribute to, or connect with. Everything journalism was, is, and will be rests on our ability to tell a story. And every story starts with an idea.

WOW STORIES

In February 2012, a working hot tub mysteriously appeared on the roof of the University of Michigan computer science engineering building. Then, roughly 48 hours later, just as mysteriously, it vanished.

“People were kind of flabbergasted,” a university spokesman said at the time. “It was obviously unex-pected. It was pretty creative and now it's gone. It left a buzz in its wake.”

Staffers at The Michigan Daily, the school's student newspaper, were the first to grab the scoop about this buzz. They were clued in after seeing photos of the machine posted anonymously to a blog. They also heard murmurings of a Reddit discussion thread that revealed its location.

The paper's subsequent story earned local and national attention, including an Associated Press report and a mention in the “Weird News” section of The Huffington Post.

Now, check out the infamous Michigan hot tub in the photo on the previous page. Really soak in the image. Enjoy looking at it, because you will hardly ever be in it.

The Michigan Daily story is the anomaly. In Occupy Wall Street terms, this is the one percent. When you are on deadline or in your story ideas meeting each week, hot tubs hardly ever fall from the sky and provide you with a memorable, newsworthy story.

Instead, we are often stuck, staring at the world (wide web) without a plausible or publishable idea and no real clue how to even begin searching. Nervousness leads to guilt, then fear, and finally outright desperation.

One example: a public request submitted by a student named Haylee. A while back, the budding journalist was facing a deadline crunch and a story shortage. In an entry posted on the community sharing site Yahoo! Answers—under the headline “Any Journalism Story Ideas?”—Haylee wrote, “My journalism teacher said that we need to have like ‘WOW’ stories for the next newspaper. I reaalllllllllllllly need an idea. Does anyone have any?”

This textbook is aimed at answering that question with a huge YES, thousands of times over. It is also aimed at teaching, inspiring, and prompting students, advisers, professors, and professionals to come up with endless WOW stories on their own. Why? Because many jobs within journalism depend upon harnessing and unleashing this WOW factor.

IN OTHER WORDS

“Reporters should learn from the get-go that uncovering story ideas is their job. Any editor worth his or her salt will make it clear that reporters who have no story ideas will not be reporters for long.”

Doug Cabral, editor, The Martha's Vineyard Times, Mass.

“Ideas are your currency, so always be pitching them, researching them, and refining them.”

Robert Terry, managing editor, Washington Business Journal, D.C.

PUBLISHED GOLD

Journalism of Ideas is a comprehensive field guide for brainstorming, discovering, reporting, digitizing, and pitching news, opinion, and feature stories within journalism 2.0. It presents advice from more than a hundred professional journalists, student journalists, journalism professors, and student media advisers and advocates. It boasts hundreds of story ideas ripe for adaptation. And it connects the advice and ideas with a slew of interactive exercises, assignment prompts, ethics and cliché alerts, and blueprints for building innovative multimedia stories.

The exercises, observations, anecdotes, and tips tou...