
A major goal of news reporting is to keep readers abridged of things, so it makes sense that uncovering and understanding trends should be part of any writer’s toolbox.
Editors — and readers — love trend reporting. Editors puff up when they’re outlet is first to report on anything. Readers use trend reporting to appear insightful during conversations at cook-outs or the coffee shop, and it provides them critical information to live well, be safe, find financial success or avoid pitfalls.
One firm fact about trend reporting is that it has never been trendier. Yet trend reporting is timeless and if you want your material to land on the front page or the home page, it is a skill worth mastering. Here are six tips to help you spot and illuminate trends in your community.
1. Trendspotting – finding the news peg
Finding trends is like any form of reporting in that it requires curiosity, thought and legwork. Reading, listening, asking questions and wondering why are key components. Some trends pop up quickly and require hustle to break the news: new musical or dining options; overly hot, cold, wet or dry weather; new policing or medical techniques; a rash of snake bites, car wrecks, infections or successful new businesses. Other trends ooze out over time: gender, age or racial changes in business or government; housing prices or availability; new methods of farming or manufacturing; epidemiological, birth or death patterns; or systemic environmental and education issues.
Find a fact, think about how it fits in (or doesn’t) to the big picture and ask those in the know what they’re seeing. Always hunt for reasons why a trend arose in your reporting.
2. Clip check for context
Once you’ve spotted a trend, or just have an idea, it’s time to see what’s already been written. This is exponentially easier in the internet age. Search a variety of ways and with multiple terms for background. Look for meaningful news accounts, government reports or scientific studies. Take note of the sources quoted (studies with sources cited or references are a gold mine of potential sources) and consider re-interviewing people who are especially on point. Dig deeper to find historical context that reveals a trend’s path. Be judicious when pulling data from past reporting, especially by other journalists or from reports that appear to be on the outskirts of rational or contemporary thought. What’s new now may be at the heart of your thesis or nut graph, but what came before or led to the trend may be just as revealing.
3. Go local, regional, national and global
Readers want to know what’s happening in their communities, but they also want to know how they fit in to the rest of the world. Once you nail the local trend, find background materials or sources that reveal how things play out elsewhere. Use a couple quick data points or examples from elsewhere to support the trend. Most times, your community will be a bit ahead or behind the curve, so be sure readers know where they land on the trendline and why.
4. Facts and figures provide the fuel
Most trends are supported by data collected by government, industry, watchdog groups or concerned individuals. Seek out current or contextual data to reveal the trendline. Find the most relevant data points and use them to support the nut graph high in the story. Sometimes a strong or startling piece of data can even become the lead. Use data to create boxes and break-outs to quickly illustrate the trend.
5. Case studies provide evidence
Finding “real people” to illustrate the trend can be tough, but it is critical to showing how the trend plays out on the ground level. Ask every source you encounter for ideas on who to call, and visit them in person when possible. Interviews with someone who has experienced the impacts of a trend is where the color and storytelling opportunities arise, and it is often where the good art, video, audio and details reside.
5. Don’t fear the trend-buster
In any trend, there are trend-busters – people, places or populations where the trend does not exist and in fact may be on a wholly opposite path. Never leave this material out of your story. Readers and editors will scoff if a piece is overly secure in its thesis, or if something appears to be happening on too large a scale. Everything in life is gray in some way and openly sharing the outliers gives the piece more power, not less. Remember, not everything is a trend – sometimes the vagaries of life are just how things are and if so, you may have to pull the plug on the idea.
With these tips in mind, give trend reporting a try, and it won’t be long before your material is popping up on the front page.
‘Enemies of the people?’ Simply, plainly – ‘no.’
As plainly and clearly as one can say or write this:
Journalism and journalists are not “enemies of the people.”
A free press brings us the news of the day, from weather to Wall Street, and when done properly functions as a “watchdog on government.” The public expects that first part, and the First Amendment — on behalf of all of us — protects that last part.
Today, at many small town publications and major metropolitan dailies and broadcast outlets big and small, something extraordinary is happening: News outlets are publishing editorials defending a free and independent press, pushing back against those who have attacked them as “enemies,” “despicable people” and purveyors of “fake news.”
“Enemies of the people?” Don’t make me laugh — though, if the implications were not so serious, we probably should.
The reality: Most journalists put their personal preferences aside in doing their job, looking for a good story regardless of political implications. “Fake news?” The term has been diluted to a current definition of news and information that some don’t want to see or hear, rather than an earlier association with factual error or deliberate misinformation.
The slander that may sting the most, the “enemies” tag, is centuries old, even appearing in a Shakespearean tragedy, but is most often associated with despots of a modern time, Stalin and Hitler. The charge simply has no place in a debate over the role, performance or ethics of a free press. It also ignores what is plain for all to see: journalists are “the people.”
Reporters and editors and broadcasters and online journalists throughout the nation live in the very same communities on which they report. Their children attend the same schools as everyone else’s. They shop in the same stores, and worship in the same places.
Most journalists work on topics like local school board policies, track government programs and officials, and report on the joys and tragedies of everyday life. Even the select group of professionals who track events in Washington or Wall Street or Silicon Valley go home at night to families and friends, just as we all do.
Yes, there are errors made in what is now journalism’s “24/7” world. There are cable TV pundits paid to pontificate, not report. The web and social media have brought us “stuff and fluff” that pretends often to be journalism but in reality is just political messaging and social posturing from those on the right and left wings of partisan debate.
A real worry is that there are just fewer journalists and fewer news outlets around to do the job — in newspapers alone, there are less than 25,000 when in 1990 there were more than 65,000. The amount of news to be reported has not shrunk accordingly. But that does not mean the remaining staffers are any less committed to clear and accurate journalism.
“We are not the enemy of the people,” Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor for the editorial page of The Boston Globe, told the Associated Press earlier this week. As of Tuesday, more than 350 newspapers and broadcast outlets said they would join in the one-day commentary combine suggested by the Globe.
Pritchard said she expects differing views from the editorials, all written locally, “but the same sentiment: the importance of a free and independent press.”
No doubt some will slam President Trump for his frequent attacks on “the media,” as if there were one, monolithic news machine rather than the diverse, independent news sources that collectively make up the nation’s news outlets.
But vitriolic attacks on the press began long before Trump found ways to exploit those terms in what he told CBS’s Leslie Stahl in 2016, as his presidential campaign began, was a deliberate tactic to “discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”
Congress tried jailing journalists it didn’t like only a few years after the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791 — and failed soon after. Not that many years ago, President Nixon had a news media “enemies list” of those to be targeted by government agencies and deployed Vice President Spiro Agnew to call journalists “nattering nabobs of negativity,” among other things. We know who, by virtue of relentless, solid reporting, was proven right in that dispute.
Today’s unprecedented editorial blitz is prompted in large degree by the perceived effectiveness of Trump and other politicians having found a new, direct way to deliver the “enemies” tag on a near-constant basis via social media — combined with the self-awareness of a news industry that knows it has been severely weakened by the web’s negative impact on both audience and advertising income.
There is some risk in today’s editorial effort: Trump may just use it as populist evidence that “the media” really is against him. Of course, he makes that case in many ways on most other days. And the 2018 State of the First Amendment survey, released in late June, clearly shows most Americans could use a reminder about the value of a free press.
For those willing to look, journalists print, broadcast and post stories each day that make our lives better, expose waste, fraud and abuse, and celebrate the good in our collective lives. For those not willing to look, and all too willing to just parrot the glib lines of leaders more interested in political traction than accurate criticism — well, no editorial is likely to change those minds.
Whatever the reason behind editorial writers nationwide making their case today in defense of good journalism, the ultimate — and effective — response in defense of a free press is in the work that simply proves the critics wrong.