Advanced reporting : essential skills for 21st century journalism / Miles Maguire.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The elements of reporting. Connecting the dot -- Defining news -- Digging into documents -- The eyes have it -- Talking your way to the story -- From principle to practice. Getting started -- The journalistic core -- Specialized topics -- Specialized forms -- Enterprise reporting -- 21st century news reporting. Technology -- Public relations and news management -- Journalism that makes a difference.

News gathering is a large, complicated and often messy task that has traditionally been viewed by journalists as irretrievably idiosyncratic, best learned through trial and error. This book takes the opposite approach, focusing on reporting as a process of triangulation based on three essential activities: analyzing documents, making observations and conducting interviews. The author shows how the best reporters use these three tools in a way that allows them to cross-check and authenticate facts, to reduce or eliminate unsupportable allegations and to take readers and viewers to a deeper level of insight and understanding.