Top methods that are followed by journalists for collecting news and facts for their newspaper are as follows:
Methods
1. A journalist must have the quality of persistence in collecting his facts. However, the approach of journalist should not be tough. The journalist has to collect and assemble his facts intelligently.
A good journalist should try to collect as many facts as he can before he sets out on a story or to interviews some person.
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He can dig many of these relevant facts from reference books or from past newspaper cuttings. These reference books and the newspaper clippings will provide very useful information to a journalist regarding the preliminary facts of a subject.
Many big newspapers have their own library containing the important reference books and also newspaper cuttings about important people and subjects filed in a systematic manner.
There are so many reference books like Who’s Who, yearbooks, dictionaries, various World Gazetteers, encyclopedias, guides, Guinness Book of Records, Fowler’s Modern English Usage etc. which can prove very useful at the time of need.
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2. Some journalists combine the deductive and the investigative methods. For investigative journalism a journalist first of all checks with his reference books. He reads what has been written previously on the subject.
Then he analyses the problem and starts investigating the true facts of the case. In fact, there are three kinds of writers of news. First of all, there is the reporter who writes what he sees.
Secondly, there is the interpretative reporter who writes what he sees and what he construes to be its meaning. Thirdly, there is the expert who writes what he construes to be the meaning of what he has not seen.
3. A journalist should never go very far from the basic facts that he cannot grasp at something solid, if he feels that his deductions are slipping.
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Sometimes, a journalist may be driven to guess work, which he may think is his intelligent deduction, in order to maintain his own reputation for expertise.
But a good journalist should try to avoid this pitfall, because nobody wants to know what he thinks. People want to know the facts and the good skill of a journalist lies in selecting the right facts.
Of course, facts may be a mixture of what he can discover and what he deduces. But it should not be his invention.
Sometimes, it so happens that a journalist tends to get him the answers, which they think the journalist would like, due to their gentlemanliness or because they want to be nice to him.
4. Thus, a good reporter must weigh the validity of the answers that are given to his questions, when he is making the inquiry to get his facts.
When an interviewee is answering his questions he should try to perceive whether he is making a false story or speaking the truth.
The deduction of the reporter will depend on his sharp intellect and experience. Like a successful advocate, a journalist must build up his questions in some definite direction to arrive at the basic facts of the case.
A journalist should always try to distinguish between a deduction and an assumption. He must not assume anything unlike an expert, because assumption may put him on a wrong track. On the other hand, a good reporter should thoroughly test all the basic assumptions, on which his story is based.