Reporting & Interviewing: How to Find Out What Happened

A water main bursts under a street you have never visited. By lunchtime a school is closed, a shop is flooded, and three different people have told you three different reasons. The water company says the pipe was in good order. A man on the corner says it was leaking for days. Someone in a parents' group chat says the council cut the repair budget.

Nothing in that paragraph is yet a story. It is a pile of claims, each from someone with a reason to say it. Reporting is the work of turning the pile into something a stranger can rely on: finding who actually saw or knows, getting them to talk, being exact about what they said, and being honest about what is still unknown.

Every journalism programme starts here, because everything else (writing, verifying, ethics, investigation) is built on the notebook. This piece is about the notebook.

Start with what you need to know, not what you think

Beginners start with a conclusion ("the council cut the budget") and go looking for people who agree. Experienced reporters start with a list of questions and a list of kinds of people who could answer them: who saw it, which records exist, who is affected, who is independent, and who has something to gain. Then they ask which of those they do not yet have.

The useful split is between firsthand and secondhand knowledge. A witness saw the water. A record was made at the time. A neighbour who heard about it from the witness is a lead, not a source: valuable for finding the witness, weak as the thing you print. And every source has an interest. The water company's press office is not lying by default, but it is the one party that most wants one version to stand.

Without JavaScript: a good first round covers an eyewitness, a record made before the event, someone affected, an independent expert, and the party with a stake. A press release alone covers only the version its author wants known.

The rule of thumb that falls out is simple. For each fact you plan to print, you should be able to name who knows it firsthand, or which document shows it. If the honest answer is "several people said so", keep going.

Sources: who actually saw it, and who is repeating it

Many newsrooms ask for two independent sources before printing a serious claim. The word that matters is independent. Six items that all say the same thing are not six confirmations if five of them copied the first. This is how a wrong fact becomes "well-known": an early report is repeated, then cited by the repeaters, and the reader sees a crowd where there is one voice.

The test is to trace each claim upstream. Where did this outlet get it? Where did that one get it? Stop when you reach someone who saw it, measured it, or holds the record, or when the trail ends at "someone said". Then count the origins, not the items.

Without JavaScript: in the tool, six items repeat the claim, but five of them trace back to the water company's statement; only the retired engineer's own examination is a second origin. Six items, two origins.

Real cases are murkier. Two sources can share a hidden upstream, such as two officials briefed by the same person. A document can be sound and still be someone's version. A source can be firsthand about one thing and hearsay about the next sentence. Good reporters ask a sentence at a time: "Did you see that yourself?"

On the record, off the record: say the terms first

People talk to reporters on conditions. Newsrooms use a small vocabulary for those conditions, and the first rule is that the terms must be agreed before the information, not after. The words are used as follows by many English-language newsrooms; they are conventions, not law, and outlets differ, so a careful reporter says out loud what they mean.

Term	Usually means
On the record	Everything can be printed, with the person's name.
On background	It can be printed, but not with the person's name; an agreed description such as "a senior official" is used.
On deep background	It can inform the story, but is not attributed to the person or to any identifiable description.
Off the record	It is not to be printed. Whether the reporter may use it to ask others is the most disputed point; many reporters insist on agreeing that explicitly.

Without JavaScript: on the record allows everything; background allows an agreed description but not the name; deep background allows the information without any attribution; off the record allows none of those, and following up with others depends on what you agreed.

Three practical points. A source cannot normally turn a statement "off the record" after saying it; many reporters honour a request as a courtesy, but the convention is that terms come first. Ask yourself why the person wants anonymity, and what you can prove without them (the ethics of that choice are in Journalism Ethics, 35/95). And a promise is a promise: in Cohen v. Cowles Media Co. (1991) the US Supreme Court held that the First Amendment did not stop a source suing two newspapers that had broken a promise to keep his name out, because the law of promises applies to everyone, including the press.

Questions: the open one, the follow-up and the silence

A closed question has a short answer: "Was the pipe old?" "Yes." An open question asks for a story: "Walk me through that morning." A leading question carries its own answer: "The council cut your budget, didn't it?" It gets agreement or a defence, and either way you have learned about your assumption, not the world. Reporters use all three, but they know which one they are using.

The craft is in what happens next. The follow-up picks up a detail the person just offered and asks for the specific: "You said it was flagged. What happened to the flag?" The silence is the one tool beginners fear. After an answer, many interviewees fill a pause with the thing they were weighing whether to say. And the last question is almost always the same: "Who else should I talk to, and what should I have asked?"

Without JavaScript: in the tool, an open question about the morning surfaces the stuck valve; an open question about what she knew surfaces an old survey flag; the follow-up on that flag surfaces the budget decision; a pause after an answer gets one more admission; the closing question gets a lead. The two closed or leading questions get almost nothing.

Questions also carry power. Interviewing a grieving relative, a child, or a frightened witness calls for a different manner from questioning a minister, and a reporter who treats them the same fails at one of the two. Pressing a powerful person who is dodging is part of the job; pressing a vulnerable person for a better quote is not.

Notes, recordings and the exact words

A quotation is a promise to the reader: these are the words the person used. That promise is easy to break by accident. Memory rounds off sentences, notes drop the small words that carry the meaning ("I would not say it failed" becomes "it failed"), and tidy-up edits change what a speaker meant. This is why reporters use a notebook for key phrases (some learn a shorthand system) and, where the source agrees, an audio recording as a check.

Recording has legal rules that vary by country, and in the United States by state. US federal law requires the consent of only one party to a conversation. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press lists about eleven states with mainly all-party consent requirements (including California, Florida and Pennsylvania) and several with partial rules. Other countries differ again, so the safest professional habit is to ask, on the recording, "Is it all right if I record this?" That is both honest and the best protection. This piece describes practice and isn't legal advice.

The second danger is the clean edit that changes the sense. Cutting words out of the middle of a quote, or keeping only the half that fits the story, can reverse it.

Without JavaScript: the version printing only "the programme failed" reverses what she said. The full line is the safest. A trimmed version that keeps her second sentence is defensible only if the story is clear she rejected the broader word.

Accuracy: the dull part that is the whole job

Accuracy is mostly small things done every time. Names are spelled by asking the person, not guessing: a reporter asks for the spelling even of "Smith". Titles, ages, dates and numbers are checked against a document or confirmed again. Figures are written with their units and their base: a number without "out of what?" is incomplete. And claims you cannot confirm are labelled as the claim of a named person, not stated in your own voice (News Writing & Storytelling, 35/93, and Verification & Fact-Checking, 35/94, go further).

Practices differ on one question. Should a reporter read a quote or a passage back to the source? Many newsrooms say no to full drafts, because it invites rewriting and gives sources control; many allow checking a specific fact or a technical term; some science and magazine desks go further. There is a real trade-off between independence and error, and a reporter should know the house rule. Whatever the rule, errors do happen. How to correct them is in Journalism Ethics (35/95).

The honest habit that sits under all of it: write down what you do not know. A reporter's notebook has a column for "unconfirmed" and a list of calls still to make, and the story is not ready until the list is shorter than the pile.

What a graduate just sees

• Every claim has an origin; count the origins, not the repetitions.
• Firsthand beats secondhand, a record made at the time beats a memory, and every source has an interest.
• Terms come before information: on the record, background, deep background and off the record mean different things, so say which.
• An open question gets a story, a closed one a nod, a leading one your own assumption back.
• The follow-up and the silence produce more than the prepared list.
• A quote is a promise about someone's words; trimming is where promises break.
• Ask the last question every time: who else, and what should I have asked?

Where it shows up next

• News Writing & Storytelling (35/93): the notebook becomes a lede, an attribution and an order of paragraphs.
• Verification & Fact-Checking (35/94): the same instinct, for photos, videos and viral claims.
• Journalism Ethics (35/95): anonymity, harm and what you owe a source.
• Investigative Journalism (35/98): the same craft over months, with documents and public records.
• In the world: HR interviews, user research, police and medical history-taking, oral history, and any job that starts with "find out what happened".

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. The Missouri Group (Brian S. Brooks, George Kennedy, Daryl R. Moen, Don Ranly, with later co-authors), News Reporting and Writing (Bedford/St. Martin's, 13th edition 2020). A standard US text, strong on sourcing, interviewing and accuracy.
• 📘 Gentler. William Zinsser, On Writing Well has a chapter on interviews; Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) is a famous, provocative essay on what reporters owe their subjects.
• 🌐 Free course. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas runs online courses at journalismcourses.org; some are free, others carry a fee, so check each one. The Ethical Journalism Network publishes free reporting guidelines.