News sources
When our newspaper appears in mailboxes 51 times a year, with 64 to more than 100 pages each week, readers probably wonder where we get all those story ideas.
Flip through any of the papers and you’ll realize a large number of people are sources for the stories.
Some of them have been contacted directly by our staff, freelancers or wire reporters. Some have been quoted from speeches at conferences or annual meetings. Some of the sources have influenced the news by holding press conferences with specific agendas.
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There are also spontaneous press conferences called scrums, where people (usually politicians) are surrounded by journalists with notebooks, tape recorders and television cameras and asked for comments on the hot event or issue of the day.
We receive a lot of phone calls, faxes, mail and e-mail that suggest story ideas. These can range from a pile of Reform party faxes sent late at night, to sporadic
e-mail messages from The National Firearms Association of Manitoba, to poetic press releases from Farmers for Justice. Sometimes we get courier packages announcing new products, containing such wonders as a bag of wheat fibre flakes from an ethanol plant in Manitoba.
The challenge isn’t finding story ideas, but selecting which story ideas to pursue and publish in a limited space.
Our reporters often create their own lists of stories they’ll pursue, but editors provide additional assignments and advice. Our various section editors must choose what will go into their sections of the paper each week.
After finding out the news allotment (what space is available after the ads are assigned to pages), the editors sort, edit and lay out the stories.
And they eagerly peruse their overflowing in-baskets for new story ideas.
