Welcome to “Research for the Newsroom: Practical tools for adding depth to breaking news and enterprise stories”, an on demand course taught by Barbara Gray of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York and John O’Neil of Bloomberg News, offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. During this four-module online course, students will learn strategies and tools for finding information in the course of your daily reporting.
Upon completion of this course you will be able to:
This course is asynchronous, with content organized into five weekly modules. Each module includes videos, presentations, readings, and discussion forums covering different topics.
Welcome! In the introductory module, you will get an overview of the course structure and meet the instructors, Barbara Gray and John O’Neil. They will provide an overview of the course and will discuss how research should be part of the work of every reporter and editor, how it can play a role in breaking news coverage as well as features, and how it can cover everything from pinning down the spelling of a name to wading into academic journals. You can also review the course’s introductory reading materials.
This module will cover:
Research shouldn’t be thought of as something “special” or “extra” that’s rolled out only for big projects. Regular news stories benefit from robust research skills as well. After all, the goal is to find out as much as you can in the time you have. This module looks at techniques you can use day in and day out, and habits that will bolster all of your reporting. We’ll discuss research you can do before news breaks to speed research when it does. We’ll talk about creating a research plan and specific tips and tools for getting the most out of search engines. And we’ll go over what you might call a research version of the five W’s: What am I trying to find out? Where can I look? Who can help me? What do I do with what I’ve learned (especially when it’s not when I expected)? What do I do if I’m stumped?
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Maybe the biggest change that’s come with the internet is access to oceans of data and statistics, but making sense of those possibilities requires a different set of skills and tools. And a different approach: data searches can be used to plug holes in stories or add depth, but also as a springboard for coming up with new questions and new lines of reporting. We’ll talk about using open data, often from government sources, but also about how to use various kinds of freedom of information requests to free data up, and how to tap into non-governmental sources. Finally, we’ll discuss how to interrogate your data: how to evaluate its credibility, assess its methodologies and figure out what questions to use it to ask.
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Module 3: Deeper dives: documents and creating your own datasets
What does it mean to have a document mindset? It’s the idea of using public records and paper trails to expose systemic problems and hold people accountable. And it’s crucial to most projects that try to go deeper than you can with most daily or even standard enterprise stories. Documents provide greater clarity and certainty – if you know how to find them, evaluate them and use them. We’ll discuss including documents in your research plan and see what critical thinking skills we need to apply here. And we’ll share practical tips on finding documents on companies, both public and private, on people, organizations, and governments.
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You want to get the story, but you want to get the story right. Especially because nothing feels worse than having weeks of work undermined by a minor error – or a major one! – that could have been caught. And this hard truth has never been truer: You are your own fact checker. It’s rarer and rarer to have the kind of safety net that at least some writers had to fall back on. So let’s learn how to do this right, starting with building fact checking into your research plan and with some key steps: challenge your hypothesis at the outset to find its weak points; correct errors as you go; double-check the basics (numbers, dates, names), and keep great records of your research.
This module will cover:
Barbara Gray is an associate professor and chief librarian at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she runs the research instruction program. She is the former director of news research at the New York Times.
Gray has presented topics on research for reporting at the Investigative Reporter and Editors Conference, NICAR, American Public Radio, WNYC Studios, Gulf States Newsroom, Summer Global Investigative Reporting Workshop at Columbia University, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, School of The New York Times Summer Academy at Fordham University, American Society of Journalists and Authors Conference, Global Investigative Journalism Conference, Investigathon New York (sponsored by Google and OCCRP), Investigathon London, and the Magnum Social Justice Fellowships Program.
Gray holds an MS in Library and Information Science from Long Island University’s Palmer School and an MA in Liberal Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. She is writing a book on why research skills are a superpower.
John O’Neil is an editor at Bloomberg News, where he has worked since 2013 as part of the Bloomberg Explainsteam. Prior to that, he was an editor at The New York Times, where he worked on the metro, Washington, culture and special sections desks before taking on explanatory projects for the Times website. While at the Times, he wrote over 800 bylined pieces, mainly on health and education. In 2004, his essay about his middle son’s autism was the capstone of a series the paper nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. In 2023, O’Neil taught a course on explanatory journalism for the Knight Center for the Americas.
O’Neil graduated from Yale University with a degree in history in 1979; his first reporting was done for the Associated Press in Nigeria and Ghana. He lives in Brooklyn with a dog and cat. O’Neil is writing lyrics for a set of new songs with members of the Cucumbers, a New Jersey indie band. An earlier collaboration with them led to an album of songs about autism that were recorded by Jackson Browne, Dar Williams and Jonatha Brooke, among others. O’Neil is also working on a graphic novel about Niccolo Machiavelli.
Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas
300 West Dean Keeton
Room 3.212
Austin, TX, 78712
Telefone: 512-471-1391
Email: journalismcourses@austin.utexas.edu
