finding stories

Having spent the good part of three months as a cub reporter floundering in the impenetrable waters of business journalism, I can safely say that there is no consensus even among the stalwarts on how one must go about chasing stories.

Until now most tradesmen have told me that the only way to find stories is by talking to people, and that’s an advice I have taken to heart. Not that it has done me much good. Most people I met in the course of following this advice had an air of studied tolerance while talking to me, as though I were a tiresome child that must be indulged.

In such cases, although one realizes there is no chance of getting a story, one is obliged to carry on a conversation for at least half an hour. One can’t show up for a ‘relationship-building interaction’ (code for ‘I have no idea what questions to ask you but want to meet you in the hope that you will blurt out your bank’s dirty little secrets) and push off after five minutes no matter how laboured  the conversation is. For there are two battles to be fought when meeting people and at least one must be won. One is to find a story, and that’s a battle I have been consistently losing. The other is to try not to look like a complete idiot by blacking out five minutes inside the meeting. So instead of concentrating on the spiel my interviewee is giving me, I must think of what I am going to ask him next. And maintaining a steady pipeline of questions is the most tiresome job, especially when you don’t give a damn about what the person sitting opposite is saying.

So I have learnt that one must have a story idea or at least a ghost of a story idea before fixing up a meeting. Of course, the one time I actually had an idea the person I was meeting completely blew me off. The bugger thought that I had traveled to the other end of the neighboring town just to present my calling card to him and gaze fondly at his mouse-like face broken by looping untrimmed whiskers, sitting atop a shrunken shriveled frame. I clearly remember what he said—“I thought you just wanted to meet me. I didn’t know you were going to ask me questions about my business.” Of course.

So far, so bad. But I thought this is the only way to go about finding stories—at least on paper. So I was in for a shock during the weekly editorial meeting. The higher-up presiding over the meeting had already pummeled me a little for not enough about what was happening on my beat when he asked me how I went about hunting for stories. “By meeting people,” I replied confidently—at least I knew the answer to this one. “That’s not how one goes about finding stories,” thundered the higher-up. “You should follow up on current developments.”

I glared accusingly at the people sitting at the table who had advised me thus. But they continued to stare ahead with glassy expressions on their faces.

Apparently there is a third slightly more extreme approach. I was grumbling to a colleague about how difficult it was to get any kind of information from foreign banks. He told me to just write to them saying I had learnt that their bank was about to collapse or something to that effect and would they like to comment, failing which I would run the story anyway. “You will hear from them within the hour,” he assured me.

I don’t know which of the above approaches will work for me. It is possible that there is no concrete formula for seeking out stories—maybe it is just a matter of luck, persistence and streetsmartness. Only time and a few by-lines will tell.