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 four main areas: information already gather and stored by the organization itself, information gathered from direct interaction with people outside of the organization, information gathered from documents and other original data sources, and information gathered from previously published sources, e.g. news reports about the topic.

All four types of information gathering can be facilitated through the thoughtful use of digital information networks, including in most cases social networks, internet searches, and AI large language models (LLMs, such as ChatGPT).

All four types of information gathering should be practiced with thoughtful curiosity and with the careful application of critical thinking skills.

In an age when AI is known to invent sources and phone calls can be faked using AI, it is essential always to seek multiple perspectives about events and to confirm information with multiple sources before publishing anything. This will protect media writers from embarrassment and potentially far worse professional consequences.

It is worth noting that people do not need sophisticated AI tools to lie or misrepresent information. Responsible media writers have always carried a healthy skepticism about the world with them at all times.

Before delving more deeply into the four categories of information gathering, it should be helpful to most students to get a sense of some basic types of information media professionals regularly gather.

Basic elements

The following are some general types of information that media writers should now about. You may not need all of these elements for every news article, broadcast story, advertisement, news release, or social media post, but it will help you as a professional to commit this checklist to memory as part of your routine practice.

You may wish to use this as an information gathering checklist. You might ask yourself: Does the current project require this type of information or not?

• target audience data
• background information regarding stakeholders and their interests
• basic who, what, when, where, why and how information about an event
• institutional and regulatory information regarding the marketplace or the service in question
• interview information from witnesses or participants
• contact information, addresses, online accounts, etc. that should be saved for follow-up research
• quotes
• photographs
• video
• documents such as government or business records where available
• relevant updates or changes to core who, what, when, where, why and how information (allow for updates as more information is learned)

You might gather audience data to justify pursuing a story as a journalist or taking a particular approach with an ad campaign or public relations strategy.

Writers always need background information about stakeholders and their interests to have a grasp of the basis for any story.

The basic concepts of who, what, when, where, why, and how, a.k.a. the 5 Ws + H are necessary elements for any story large or small. In fact, these concepts are so essential they are often covered in grade school language arts classes.

Institutional and regulatory information is necessary because it gets at the question of "Who is in charge?" Journalists often rely on official sources to get basic information for news stories. Advertising and public relations professionals often need to understand regulations related to the products and services they promote or support.

Interview information is essential for most news stories written by journalists. Advertising and public relations professionals might interview individuals inside and outside of their organization to gather the facts and feelings needed to promote certain products or points of view.

As a matter of routine practice, contact information should be saved when interviewing anyone outside of your organization.

Quotes, photos, and video content are essential elements of most media products. It is good to plan ahead for which elements you will need for a particular media product. 

Documents and data are helpful for in-depth projects no matter the media field. Depending on the scope of a project, more or less data may need to be gathered.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge that your understanding of the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a given topic or story might change as you gather more information. It is essential to periodically return to those core points and ask how your understanding of each may have shifted.

The rest of this section covers internat and external information gathering. 

Interviewing is covered in some depth in Section 3.2.

Before you walk out that door

Assume you are a media writer with an assignment in hand. It helps to have a plan for information gathering before you start. These are suggested steps.

Step 1: Almost every media professional gathers as much information within their organization as they can before they start looking to set up interviews and search for external documents and data.

In newspapers historically, this would have meant a trip to "the morgue," which is the internal archive where past newspapers are cataloged and stored along with finding aids. Finding aids are tools used in libraries and other archives that help people narrow down their searches and find what they are looking for.

Additional in-house information often comes from colleagues and co-workers. Media professionals regularly attend all-hands strategy sessions, information sessions, small team meetings etc., and although there are at times 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 with outside sources. 

For example, media writers in advertising agencies, known as copywriters, 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 communication practice is essential for setting a project scope and understanding what types of information they are expected to gather. 

Most advertising copywriters would say that information from the brand is not enough to successfully market a product. Advertisers not only need to know product features and specifications, they need to know what previous ad campaigns have focused on. They also need timely information about what audiences think, and they need to know what trends are dominating the market for any given product. Before asking for funds to conduct external research, copywriters and other creators working in advertising should find out if that information has already been gathered and is available in house. 

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 PR work, much of the information needed will come from the organization being represented. Internal information gathering means gathering facts about what the company or agency is doing and how that information should be prioritized and presented publicly. This part of the process may be the same for "good" or "bad" news. A good public relations professional will demand to constantly be made aware of programs or products under development 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, be it at a large corporation, small company, or government agency, etc., public relations 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. At the root of internal information gathering in public relations is to get the internal "story" and to discuss what will be emphasized when and on which media platforms.

Internal information gathering is essential. It helps set expectations for the writing task or project and makes sure relevant institutional knowledge is shared. That said, it is only the start of a process.

Firsthand information gathering

Once you have gathered all of the relevant available in-house information and ascertained the expectations of your team, the following are key tips for information gathering for each sub-field. 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 offer different perspectives from different media writing fields.

• Journalism: Interviewing sources by phone or in person is the one of the best ways to gather accurate information efficiently. While the details of interviewing will be covered in the next section, a good initial goal is to cover the 5 Ws + H (who, what, when, where, why, and how) 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, by listening to law enforcement scanner traffic, by cultivating community relationships, and by posting breaking news contact information on the organization's website and social channels. At planned events, commonly called press conferences or news conferences, representatives from government, law enforcement, the business community, community groups, etc. provide the news media with information that 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: If we consider planning meetings with brands and media platforms to be internal information gathering in ad agencies, then firsthand external information gathering consists of interviews, focus group meetings, and social media interactions. Copywriters, along with advertising researchers, might share product information or test ads with audiences individually or in group settings to get in-depth responses. They might try different versions of social media posts and see which ones garner more engagement. The information they gather should tell them not only what product features and messages people respond to. The data should indicate why the information and messages resonate. The goal is to learn how to build emotional connections between products and/or brands and audiences.
• Public Relations: If internal information gathering is, in a sense, getting an organization's story straight before going public, firsthand information gathering in public relations involves communicating directly with community stakeholders and with target audiences. 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. Similar practices of interviewing individuals, conducting focus group meetings, and testing social media messages are essential to know and to practice.

Documents and data

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

A good place for media writing students to begin searching, analyzing, and making sense of data is the U.S. Census site. Data from the U.S. Census can be used to compare geographical regions across a variety of topics and social issues. The applications of census data for journalism vary widely and are covered much more thoroughly by the Investigative Reporters and Editors group. For advertising and public relations students, working with Census data can be your introduction to working with demographic and target audience data.

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 from individuals or organizations for governmental, scientific, industrial, marketing, or other purposes is 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.