Pointers from Poynter

I read the Poynter Institute’s “How to Focus, Interview, and Get the Story Told” and found that I agreed with a lot of the tips they gave. It also made me think of how I’ve handled my own project.

The first topic they discussed was focus. I definitely think my story on Girl Scouts lacked focus from the beginning. I had trouble contacting the people I wanted to contact, and the people I contacted originally have stopped replying to my phone calls and emails. It definitely didn’t end up the way I had envisioned.

Then they discussed theme. Scanlan mentioned that you should be able to sum up your story in one word, and I am pretty positive I couldn’t have even done that before I went out to find the Girl Scout story. It made me realize that of course it didn’t have any focus as a finished product, because I never even thought about its focus before I started.

McCombs also talked about focusing your information, which is especially difficult when people (as opposed to facts) are involved. She advised to watch out for the little interesting things, because they distract from the focus. However, this is one of the reasons I love convergence. I have always liked feature-based stories just because you have more freedom as a reporter to tell the story you want to tell, and with convergence you have more mediums to do so. You can have your story, captions, photos, video, audio, whatever you need. And it’s all online, so you have nearly unlimited content space.

The next topic I related to was their interviewing tips. I go back and forth on my ability as an interviewer. I always thought I was good at it. I can talk to people, and listen to what they say. I can ask follow up questions pretty easily too. But this semester, as I was trying to cut out my questions, I found it difficult. Sometimes their answers didn’t make sense without my question in front of it.

I’m also not a very outspoken person, so the ‘just go up and talk to them’ approach to interviewing is very difficult for me. I feel very intrusive just asking people questions. I think it is the Midwest politeness coming out in me. I think if they don’t want to talk about it, it’s not my place to ask. That probably doesn’t cut it in journalism.

I also liked what Murphy had to say about adding ‘gee whiz’ and genuine moments into your video. This is probably because of my flair for the feature piece. However, this probably isn’t always true for the hard-hitting, ‘see it at 10 tonight’, stories. I feel like this almost contradicts what McCombs had to say about not letting the interesting facts get in the way of your story. Yes, I love these moments that Murphy is talking about, but do they distract from your story? Should you save them for a different kind of story? Perhaps.