James Gaines has put together an impressively elegant flowchart for data stories which I wanted to share here.

What I particularly like is the focus on speaking to experts early on. James is coming at this from a science journalism perspective, where expertise is particularly vital, but this applies to other disciplines too. So many times you can find out about, or get to, data through simply talking to someone who deals with it, rather than going through FOI or spending hours on searches.
It also connects nicely with my own flowchart on finding data to which you can now add Import.io as James does, plus Kimono.