checklists

5. Changing your approach to desk-based research – first steps.

Would you like to enrich your desk-based coverage on global issues? There are a few simple steps you can take to begin with.

1. Did I do wider media research to get a sense of what is actually possible?

There are media which do a great job – New Humanitarian, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Solutions Tracker, Positive News and many others. Follow them, scan through the stories they publish, look for the themes and topics they explore, identify perspectives and angles they use, what types of voices they include and how they narrate the story.

2. Did I make my own outside of the box list of media and expert resources to follow?

Did I manage to enrich my work by drawing on fresh and varied content that nobody else has covered?

3. Did I start to follow these sources systematically?

For example, by subscribing to their newsletters or following them on social networks?

4. Did I change my routine?

Did I, for instance, decide that while covering the top large macro stories, I would always include a certain amount of smaller micro or mezzo stories taking place in less prominent settings – or, even better, in marginalized contexts on the periphery of mainstream media interest?

5. Did I reflect on the fact that information on less prominent or even neglected issues is also worth covering in order to bring a more complex picture of the world to my audience? 6. Did I change my approach to how I source and use agency news?

Do I look also for information, news services, from less prominent parts of the world and underreported stories?

7. Did I prepare a list of media which offer professional, expert, diverse and balanced content for free reuse?

You may also like other checklists

1. Am I doing my job inclusively?

Information we work with is influenced in many ways - both, when received as well as when reproduced to our audience. It is not an easy job to minimise these effects, keeping the story and message inclusive might help.

2. Critical analysing of information

This checklist could help you to identify narratives, discourses and frames journalists (usually) unconsciously use while doing a journalism job. Do not take it as a manual or exhausting list of to do and not to dos - it is more about food for thoughts when gathering, selecting, processing and reproducing whatever information we get into contact with.

3. Going to the field

What to have in mind before departure on the ground? Especially distanced contexts. What not to forget?

4. Making entry into a community

This checklist is based on Reporting Diversity Manual – it could help you to make contact with members of minority community, but can be used for other social groups as well.

6. Collecting findings: tips and suggestions.

Nowadays, journalists have a universe of new technologies to communicate across the world – reliably, instantly and for free (or almost). This is the ‘new normal’ for news coverage and journalists have to adapt to make the most of these new opportunities. This checklist might help you with fulfilling this aspiration.

7. Planning is the essence of good coverage.

Irrespective of whether you are working from behind a desk or in the field, solid research and planning is where good journalism begins. This is especially true if you don't really know a lot about the topic. The following checklist is based on recommendations in a textbook on migration reporting, People Between the Lines: A Handbook on Migration for (Future) Journalists.

Take me back to all checklists