3: Information Gathering and Interviewing

Information gathering refers to searching, reading, and interviewing in order to collect enough facts to produce a piece of media content. For a basic social media post or a brief report, information gathering still requires effort and verification.

You might begin by reviewing the social media content of knowledgeable individuals and organizations. You should conduct multiple internet searches for relevant facts, and you must double check your facts so that each piece of information is backed up by at least two reliable sources.

Random people on social media are not reliable sources no matter now confident their assertions may seem. Verifying information does not mean finding people who agree with your point of view on a topic. It means finding facts from individuals and institutions who might reasonably have and understand the information that you need.

For more in-depth reports, information gathering usually requires a combination of gathering previously published articles, conducting fresh interviews, and consulting relevant data when you can get it. Reliable data for news, advertising, and public relations purposes often comes from government sources. They can usually reasonably be expected to gather basic information in good faith, particularly when it is their profession to gather, analyze, and store that information.

In other words, for example, census data may not be perfect, but it is better than assumptions of someone who created a TikTok account, which requires no effort or particular knowledge.

Please note that requests for government data may take weeks to be filled. If you are planning an in-depth report, please keep this in mind.

Media reporters and writers should always seek to gather additional original documents and data whenever possible. For example, an academic researcher may independently examine a topic for which there are also government reports. Rather than trying to pre-determine which source is accurate, it is better to compare both sets of data and think about how they were gathered and analyzed.

When gathering info, it is essential for media professionals to develop a sense of when "enough is enough." There are almost infinite possible sources of information that you might consult, but it is not possible to contact every person and gather every document. Setting expectations based on the scope of the expected media product is essential.

This is not an investigative journalism textbook. The focus here is on teaching you how to gather enough information to be able to create basic media content that is professional, accurate, and done on deadline!

The core concepts covered in the next few sections should be enough to get you started whether you expect to go into social media management, journalism, advertising, or public relations and related fields.

• The first content section of this chapter covers techniques for gathering information found online and in print.
• The second section briefly covers interviewing for mass media purposes. (There are other types of professional interviewing such as conducting job interviews or gathering interview data for market research or academic research purposes. Those are covered in great depth in other texts.)
• The third section covers basic data gathering and analysis techniques again for media writing purposes.
• That same section includes a brief discussion about the ethical challenges of information gathering in a society where people with access to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini AI, etc. might assume that everything a large language model tells them is true. We work to carefully critique that line of reasoning.

We also briefly mention privacy concerns. Media professionals must respect the privacy of all the stakeholders involved in the content they publish, and media writers must still practicing rigorous, thorough information gathering techniques.