Seeing the forest for the trees

Reporters and editors can become so busy with the day-to-day grind of covering meetings and spot news and getting the copy in, edited, on the page and to the press on time that they miss one of the underlying elements of any story—Why.

It becomes second nature for reporters to check the daily police logs, attend a council meeting or cover a fire, then return to file the story. But reporters sometimes forget to ask that last, and most important, question. Why gets to the heart of any story. Why is this story important to my life? Why should I care? Why is this happening? It is the story behind the story.

There was a story in a local newspaper recently about a governmental agency ruling that all boats being launched into the lake would have to be inspected for an invasive species. OK, it seemed simple enough and the paper ran a few paragraphs notifying people about this. When I saw the story, I started looking for the other piece—the story that explained the havoc this was going to cause.

You see, I live in a resort community that relies on access to the lake that accommodates tens of thousands of boaters each year. It’s a major factor in the local economy.

The questions the few paragraphs raised in my mind were: How is this going to affect boaters? Who is going to staff the public boat launches to inspect these boats? And, more importantly, who is going to pay for it?
Public boat ramps in the region are regulated by a myriad of agencies from localities to state parks to the U.S. Forest Service. With this requirement for inspections, who is going to pay for this extra staff in a time of economic hardships? What about when fishermen head out at 4 a.m.? Will someone be waiting to inspect their boats in the dark, or will thousands of taxpayer dollars have to be spent on purchasing large gates?

Then there’s the impact on local businesses, in this case marinas, which launch boats at their facilities. This mandate came in early fall as the season wanes, but marinas maintain a brisk business on warm days. How will this affect them? Will they have to have extra staff on hand to perform inspections?

That then raised questions of the inspectors. Just who were the people that would be performing these inspections? Of course, this governmental agency wasn’t providing or paying for these people. So, where do they come from and how are they trained?

Not one word. No answers to any of these questions.

I use this example not to pick on one of the local newspapers, but to illustrate a point. Reporters and, most importantly, editors need to take a few minutes every day to consider the big picture. To ask why. To ask themselves, how will this affect our readers, our business community, our localities? To ask who will pay for it. (An eternal question for nearly any story.)

It is only in looking at the big picture that you see the bigger story.
It’s not possible to cover every question in the course of a day’s reporting, especially when the newsroom is being called on to do more than ever before from posting to the Web, to take pictures to designing pages. But, there’s always the next issue. Assign the reporter to follow up, to ask the questions, to get the answers. You’ll serve the reader better, and the reporters looking to improve their own skills. And, hopefully, the next time, the reporter will ask the big picture questions from the start.