If it’s all about productivity, then make your stories count

SHOWCASE | July 12, 2005

Future files, done right, make for better watchdog reporting. Michael Bugeja of Iowa State tells how.

By Michael Bugeja

A few months ago I received an email from a former reporter about “story counts” playing a key role in personnel decisions at newspapers owned by a particular media chain. Editors at her Midwest metro were evaluating reporters primarily on the number of stories done in a typical news cycle—not on the substance of those accounts.

“Also,” she added, “continuing staff cuts meant that one employee often ended up doing the job of two or three. Not surprisingly, these quotas and cutbacks—plus the Internet boom—kept reporters more in the newsroom than out on the street.”

I wrote about the impact of technology in my last article carried by The Watchdog, titled, “It’s hard to bump into stories if you don’t leave the office.”

But that’s only part of the problem. If journalists are evaluated based on story count, rather than substance of stories, the news will be “hit and miss” because of lack of context. Without follow-up, reports that “hit” home with readers may soon be forgotten and ones that “miss” may remain under-developed.

These days only a few select stories are followed up with any fervency. These include tragedies, of intense “human interest,” certainly; but they also include ones that spawn “celebrity interest,” with encyclopedic accounts of a runaway bride in Georgia and an offensive professor in Colorado.

Futures files can fix that imbalance because they allow each report to make the news on its own merits, without editorial interference about what the audience wants or perceives to need. Magazines will always do that better than newspapers.

Conversely, newspapers have a higher calling: to hold public officials accountable so that citizens can make intelligent decisions in the voting booth.

Futures files help fulfill this mission. They also enhance productivity—not the corporate kind—but the watchdog kind.

Case in point: If you report that someone has been arraigned for a crime, don’t stop there: include the date of the preliminary hearing. Cover that hearing, if you can; but if you can’t, then at least follow up with a call to the prosecutor. And keep doing that through the judicial process, all the way through the court of appeals, if necessary, providing the public with a complete record.

When you keep such a record, something surprising may occur. Seemingly mundane stories will metamorphose into front-page ones because you will have captured human interest, bureaucratic ineptitude, judicial arrogance, police wrongdoing, or some other unforeseen development that affirms the tradition of the Fourth Estate.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Stephen Berry, who worked for the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel, and now teaches at the University of Iowa School of Journalism, is a big believer in story follow-up. He took up investigative reporting because he found “the daily news grind so frustrating,” he says in a telephone interview. “Not a day would go by that I would not come up with some idea that would require additional research or reporting. So I would write myself a note—literally on the back of a paper napkin—and stick it in my top pocket so when I got back to the office I could put it in the futures file.”

Berry notes that editors not only demand a high story count now, but also fully developed, regular weekenders.

A futures file is essential to keep up with that pace.

Berry recalls a time in his 33-year journalism career when he did a weekly column, relying on his futures file. He maintained it out of, as well as in, the newsroom “I’d brainstorm ideas. I’d be sitting at lunch and an idea would come to me, so I’d grab a paper napkin and write it down in the hope that I would get to it.

“Frequently I would be sitting at a City Council meeting and I would get a tip from an item that would be discussed very briefly or would see an item on the consent agenda”—items to which all parties agreed— “that sounded interesting. Those items were mostly routine stuff and they didn’t need any real discussion,” he notes, “but they were always a great place for bureaucrats to hide things that they didn’t want to be made public.”

You can’t pull down such information from the Internet. You have to be on site.

When Berry was covering City Hall in Greensboro, North Carolina, sometimes he would wander the halls “and pop into a Parks and Recreation meeting or a Housing Commission meeting and sit down and see who was there, to kill time,” he recalls. “And out of that came some of my early investigative stories.”

True, he concedes, the typical reporter in a converged newsroom may not enjoy that kind of liberty. But even in such cases a futures file is only going to make stories more substantive.

Here are other tips:

Visit your newspaper’s digital or physical morgue and read a week’s worth of stories—from a year ago. Do this each week. What stories can be followed up on?
Analyze your newspaper’s “Top Stories of the Year” (usually reported in early January). Go back in time to see which ones would make good five-, 10- and 25-year anniversary follow-ups.
Pay attention to holiday stories—Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and so on—in search of forgotten human interest pieces that might beg for follow-up.
Check out small items, too, including university, federal and civic grants; initial reports of scientific discoveries; and local and national “news in brief” that may have developed into major stories, unbeknownst to the public.
See other follow-up ideas posted by readers of The Watchdog.

Finally, for those weaned on Internet, here’s how you keep a futures file:

Number file folders 1 through 31, representing that date in any given month. (For example, a file folder numbered “8” represents any eighth day of any month.)
Put information in the appropriate folder a few days before an anticipated deadline. (For example, if a preliminary hearing is scheduled on the 10^th, insert any previous articles, court documents and other data and notes in the folder marked “8,” giving you a few days prep time.)
Add an additional folder labeled “weekender,” “column” or “investigation” for more in-depth stories. (Label this your “idea file.”)

That’s it. Then follow up.

If you do so, you will enhance your productivity, along with audience interest and civic accountability.

Michael Bugeja is director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, Iowa State University. His latest book, "Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age" (Oxford, 2005), recently won the Clifford G. Christians Award for Research in Media Ethics.

E-mail: bugeja@iastate.edu

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