Tag Archives: curiosity

How to use FOI to develop good journalism habits

Being curious: how often is this happening? How much has it increased?

Headlines:
Rising numbers of hospital patients so fed up they discharge themselves
Figures reveal how many lives firefighters have saved
Welsh parents owe thousands in school dinner debts — All these stories involve asking the question “how much” or “how many” about an issue or event

Headlines:
How the cost of paying up is sending bailiffs' diaries wild
Council use of bailiffs to chase debts jumps 16% in two years
Acid attack hospital admissions have almost doubled
Student Loans Company overcharges 78,000 graduates
Schools converting to academies cost councils £30m — All these stories involve asking the question “how much” or “how many” about an issue or event

Curiosity is the first quality I identified in my series on the 7 habits of successful journalists — and FOI is a great way to hone that.

One good way to get started with FOI is to identify an event or problem that you’ve read about, and get curious about it: how many times is that event happening? How much is that problem costing? These are perfect questions for FOI.

Continue reading →

The 7 habits of successful journalists — starting with curiosity

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Curiosity scepticism persistence empathy creativity discipline passion

Are good reporters born — or made? Can you teach the curiosity that all good journalists possess? The persistence of the best reporting? The creativity of the most compelling stories? Every so often I hear a journalist say that you can’t — that those quaities are ‘innate’ or “can’t be taught”…

This line of thought — a line which lacks the very curiosity and persistence that journalists are expected to aspire to — bothers me.

And it’s bothered me for some time.

Over the last year I’ve been thinking about these qualities a lot, what they might be, how educators teach them, and how they could be developed in journalism students and trainees more explicitly.

Today, then, I’m publishing the first in a series of posts exploring 7 habits that we often attribute to the best journalism, and to good journalists — and identifying ways that those habits are and can be encouraged and developed.

The 7 qualities are: Continue reading →

Soft skills: can you make a ‘born journalist’?

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Perseverance and confidence - what students want to learn

When asked to write what they wanted to learn, two students in one of my classes explicitly asked for "Perseverance" and "Confidence"

Are journalists born or made? Some will tell you that there are certain qualities you can’t teach: dogged determination, for example; nosiness; skepticism.

It’s a sort of nature/nurture debate that runs through not only the profession itself, but also many of those who train journalists. “There’s only so much you can teach,” they will say.

But is there? Continue reading →