3.1: Basic information gathering

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Attendee takes notes at a climate conference. (Unsplash free-to-use license; The Climate Reality Project)

Information gathering for the purposes of media writing can be broken down into three main areas: information that is gathered from firsthand accounts, information gathered from documents and other original data sources and information gathered from already published sources, i.e. secondary sources. All three types of information gathering can be facilitated by thoughtful use of digital information networks, including social networks. As such, all three types of information gathering should be practiced with curiosity but also with the careful application of critical thinking skills. Even in-person events researched ahead of time online might not be what organizers claim they are. It is best practice to always gather more information than you think you will need and to always seek multiple perspectives about events before publishing anything.

Before you walk out that door

It helps to have a plan for information gathering before you start. Almost every media professional who gathers information firsthand from external sources gathers as much background information internally from within their organization before they start. Media professionals regularly attend all-hands strategy sessions, information sessions, small team meetings etc., and although there are many meetings that "could have been an email," it is necessary for an organization to share knowledge internally before those who gather information externally get to work in earnest.

When media writers practice good organizational communication and share an understanding with team members in their workplace about the nature of the information they need to get, the expectations for info-gathering will be clear, and the process can work as smoothly as possible for all involved.

The main strategic elements to iron out before starting information gathering in earnest include discussing time frame, i.e. when information gathering should stop so writing and production can begin, the amount of information you are expected to get, and the nature of the information expected.

For example, media writers, a.k.a. copywriters, in advertising agencies are constantly in communication with small teams within the ad agency, with brand representatives, and with representatives of the legacy and social media outlets where their content will be placed. They have a good idea of what the final product should look like before they gather most of the information they will use to write. This just makes sense in terms of setting a project scope and having some idea of what types of information they are expected to gather.

Most copywriters and other creative professionals at advertising agencies would say that information from the brand is never enough to successfully market a product. Advertisers need to know what audiences think, and they need to know what trends are dominating the market for any given product. Often, that information has already been gathered and is available in house. Internal firsthand information gathering is essential. It sets expectations and makes sure relevant institutional knowledge is shared among team members. That said, it is only the start of a process.

Basic elements

Here are some general types of information a media writer will often be expected to gather. You should use this as a checklist every time you gather information. You may not need all of these elements for every news article, broadcast story, advertisement, news release, or social media post, but it will almost always help to check:

• target audience data
• background information regarding stakeholders and their interests
• basic who, what, when, where, why and how information about an event (often gathered ahead of time)
• quotes
• photographs
• relevant updates or changes to the core who, what, when, where, why and how information
• institutional and regulatory information regarding who oversees the marketplace or the service in question
• contact information, addresses, online accounts, etc. pertaining to follow-up research
• documents such as government or business records, digital and on paper, where possible
• video

You might gather audience data to justify pursuing a story as a journalist or taking a particular approach with an ad campaign or PR strategy. Writers always need background information about stakeholders and their interests to have a grasp of the basis for telling any story. The basic concepts of who, what, when, where, why, and how, a.k.a. the 5 Ws + H are covered as essentials for writing in most language arts curriculum.

In media writing the terms mean the same thing, but the primary concern is timeliness. 

Many times in media writing, it is not enough to simply have a person to base a story on and a topic to cover. Media writers also need to focus on what is happening in the present.

This means the "who" might need to focus not on the subject with the most compelling story but on the subject who has had the most recent experience with the topic at hand.

Media writers, particularly in advertising and PR, often cannot pick and choose their "what." The "what" will come from advertisers, clients or editors, and it is your job to update the known information and make relevant changes to content.

Other basic elements might be considered boring housekeeping measures, but in the long term they are some of the most essential pieces of information you will gather.

No journalist, advertising or PR professional will be consistently successful if they fail to keep in touch with key stakeholders and sources. Keeping track of contact information seems obvious, but in practice knowing an individual's preferred form of communication and using it can be the difference between getting the information needed for a follow-up and missing it.

Photos and video will need to be gathered for many media projects. Often, media writers serve as their own producers and must shoot photos and video themselves. Approaches to gathering this type of information will be discussed in later chapters.

The next section, 3.2 covers interviewing and how to select quotes.

Firsthand information gathering

Since this text aims to serve all types of media writers and since information gathering can differ significantly from one branch of the field to another, it makes sense to organize each discussion here according to the major branches of the media writing field.

Once you have gathered all of the relevant available in-house information and ascertained the expectations of your team, these are key tips for information gathering for each sub-field

• Journalism: Interviewing sources by phone or in person is the best way to gather information. While the details of interviewing will be covered in the next section, a good initial goal is to cover the 5 Ws + H with each person you interview. That way, you can double source facts and add nuance to your report. Attendance at events is a particularly common way to gather information. Journalists separate news events into two main categories, breaking news and planned events. News organizations are made aware of breaking news events by tracking social media constantly for information on their geographical region or key topics of interest, by listening to law enforcement scanner traffic, by cultivating community relationships so citizens feel welcome to share breaking news tips, and by posting breaking news contact information on the organization's website and social channels. Another type of in-person opportunity to gather news is the planned event. Commonly called press conferences or news conferences, these are opportunities for governments, law enforcement agencies, businesses, organized community groups, etc. to provide news professionals with information they feel they want or need to make public. When covering planned events, the job of the journalist is to act as more than mere stenographer repeating what the official sources say. Instead, journalists should take what they learn at planned events and examine if there is more to the story.
• Advertising: Firsthand information gathering in the advertising industry is often done by videoconferencing with brand representatives and representatives of the media or social media outlet where the ads will be placed. In some cases, all three groups come together at once. Alternatively, the agency might meet with the brand first to understand the product and to ascertain their marketing goals and budget before discussing options with media and social media publishers that would then need to be approved by the brand before ads are purchased. At every step, the advertising copywriter should be kept in the loop so they can understand as fully as possible the goals of the brand and the nature of the platforms on which their content will appear. The types of information copywriters need to know include the key features of a product, its target market, and any noteworthy emotional aspects about the product or brand that might help them connect with audiences.
• Public Relations: Public relations and public affairs professionals constantly concern themselves with understanding what the companies or agencies they represent would like to share and what they would prefer to downplay or not make public at all. In regular day-to-day or PR work, much of the information needed will come from the organization being represented, local community stakeholders, and from their targeted audience. In this way, information gathering in PR is similar to the work done in the advertising industry because the purpose is to connect audiences with positive, informative messages about the company or agency. A good PR professional will demand to constantly be made aware of new programs or products being planned and will strategically plan months in advance for releasing information in the best possible ways on the best channels to reach targeted audiences, both large and small. Public relations and public affairs professionals have another challenge, which is to manage crisis communications. When a crisis happens for a large corporation, smaller company, government agency, etc., PR professionals will demand to know everything possible about the causes of the crisis and what the organization's plan of action is. PR professionals may suggest plans of action, but they are primarily charged with learning about the issue and quickly developing a strategy for a public communication plan. 

Documents and data

Data for use in news stories, advertising and PR strategies also comes from primary and secondary sources. Although different branches of the mass media field have different uses for data, we are generally talking about large amounts of information organized and available either online or as downloadable files. This section is not divided according to Journalism, Advertising, and PR, but key points are made for different branches where relevant.

One thing is almost a guarantee for future media writers: They will have to be data literate and at the very least able to understand audience tracking data for the media products they contribute to and for the audiences they target.

To get started looking at data for the purpose of telling a story, at the very least, every student of media writing should be able to explore U.S. Census data to compare geographical regions to one another in terms of some socially relevant issue. The applications of census data for journalism vary widely. For advertising and PR students, this can be a good example of working with demographic data, which is key for learning how to target specific audiences.

If you were to download census data from the U.S. government, you would be accessing the data from the source. This is by definition primary data.

Definition: Primary data

Large amounts of information collected with a purpose in an organized manner received from the individual, group, or institution that collected it would be considered primary data. Collections of primary data are usually stored in databases, which might be directly accessible online, downloadable as database files or as spreadsheets, or at times made available in text-based files such as PDFs.

Secondary data collections are those that have been manipulated in some way. In this case, "manipulated" does not mean anything nefarious. It indicates that the data have already undergone some analysis. A good example of a secondary data source might come from a non-profit organization or nongovernmental organization that collects data about a topic from multiple sources and then draws comparisons of their own while still making large amounts of data available to the public, e.g. data about unhoused people in multiple cities might be kept by city and/or state governments, depending on the region. When nonprofit organizations organize and compare these data sets while making new spreadsheets and/or other data files available to the public, they are providing secondary data.

Definition: Secondary data

A good definition of secondary data comes from Rodrigo Zamith's Data Driven Storytelling open educational resources textbook. It states, "You can think of secondary data sources as those that have been aggregated or otherwise modified by some third party (not the originators of the data). This may include, for example, a single dataset produced by a non-profit environmental group that combines information from multiple government datasets. It may also include a “cleaned” version of a dataset produced by someone else.

Zamith breaks down the advantages of different types of data. The advice is shared here in its entirety, again from Data Driven Storytelling.

Looking deeper

Advantages of primary data sources

Data journalists will often begin by looking for the original (“raw”) data and obtain it from the primary source. That is because there are several advantages to this strategy.

By working with the original data, you can dig into all potential aspects of those data and not be restricted to what a third party believes is most interesting (e.g., their decision to aggregate data to the state level). Like journalists, the authors of studies, white papers, and reports can only discuss some aspects of the data due to time and space limitations, and they might not focus on the relationships that might be most interesting to the citizens in your community. Similarly, some agencies will choose to only post a portion of their data online in order to (a) reduce the size of the dataset that they have to host and (b) make those data more manageable for ‘regular’ citizens. However, they may be able to provide the complete dataset upon request.

Additionally, by using a primary data source, a third party’s analytical mistake does not have to affect you. Put another way, you can run your own calculations on the primary data and thus have greater confidence that everything is in order, from the quality of the data in the dataset to the way a mathematical operation was executed.

Advantages of secondary data sources

There are also certain advantages to working with secondary data that can make them an alluring option for data journalists.

Doing your own data analysis might be really time-consuming, so a data journalist may want to let someone else do that heavy lifting. Additionally, the third party may be better at analyzing data or have certain subject expertise that a data journalist lacks. For example, a third party may be more capable at detecting and correcting issues in the original data and combining it with outside data to produce a more robust and accurate dataset. In those cases, it might be perfectly sensible to rely on secondary data sources to produce accurate and insightful journalism.

A data journalist simply must be certain they really trust the source of the secondary data and recognize that this option may limit their ability to find stories in data and tell them through data. In other words, there is a lot of useful information that can get lost through the filter of a third party.

Collecting one’s own data

Data journalists can also collect data themselves, or rely on a third party to collect the data on their behalf. Indeed, news organizations have won awards for their original data collection efforts, as with the Washington Post’s database on fatal shootings involving police.

Collecting one’s own data has several advantages. The main advantage is that the journalist can choose exactly which variables to get data for and who to get it from. Data journalists will often find that the data they are most interested in has not yet been collected. Put simply, there is no data if the journalist does not collect it themselves. Additionally, data journalists can also get the most recent data possible if they do their own data collection. If they rely on existing data, journalists may have to work with information that is months if not years old.

Media organizations may also wish to collect their own data but delegate the task to a trusted third party that is experienced in collecting data. This is often the case with polling data, but it can also involve other tasks. Letting a third party take charge of data collection can yield better data since research consultants tend to have the skills and background necessary to increase the likelihood the data will be representative and robust.

Secondary sources

Anyone who has ever written a research paper in high school or college is probably familiar with the use of the terms "primary" and "secondary" sources in academia. Primary sources in this context include original documents, creative works, and artifacts, according to this libguide from the University of Missouri. Secondary sources are those that "analyze, interpret, or comment on primary resources," per the same libguide. Following this definition, academic research papers, documentary films, news reports, encyclopedias, high quality blogs and podcasts, and particularly knowledgeable influencers might all be considered viable secondary sources. 

All secondary sources do not carry the same weight or value in the eyes of an audience. Media writers should be cautious citing secondary sources, but building a foundation of knowledge from multiple secondary sources is commonplace.

• Journalists as a matter of habit will often start researching a potential story topic by reading everything other journalists have written about it in the past that they can get their hands on. This is a good way to establish a basic understanding of events, key stakeholders, upcoming events and unfinished business, and to learn the terminology used as well as attitudes and opinions about the issue of phenomenon. 
• Advertisers will want to gather published reports about previously successful and unsuccessful ad campaigns for any brand they partner with or wish to partner with. A common period of initial research in the advertising industry happens when the agency decides to make a pitch to a major brand to manage an ad campaign or campaigns. Secondary sources in this case include previous ad campaigns, write-ups in advertising blogs and magazines discussing previous campaigns, wins, fails and everything in between, and any published article discussing the brand that has been published recently enough to have bearing on the pitch. Companies seeking pitches will expect the agency to know almost as much as they do about their previous successes and failures at branding and launching products.
• Public relations and public affairs professionals live and die by their ability to get their version of messages into the mouths of broadcasters and onto the pages and platforms of other media companies. A PR professional's portfolio will likely include published reports that document where they were able to garner coverage for their client, how favorable the coverage was, whether accurate information was delivered to mass audiences, and how large the audience reached was likely to have been.

Secondary sources of information must be referenced carefully. Many cases of plagiarism (inadvertent or not) from the highest levels of academia down to moderately popular influencers have occurred when a media writer repeats something they read or heard elsewhere without giving credit to the publication or individual who said it first. Organization and labeling of pull quotes and other bits of information are key in using secondary sources professionally.