How do journalists actually find stories?
Far less through dramatic tip-offs than the popular image suggests. Most stories come from routine, systematic sources — and the ones that do not are what distinguishes original journalism from the rest.
The routine sources, which fill most of a newspaper:
The diary. A forward planning list of scheduled events — court dates, council meetings, company results, reports being published, anniversaries, sporting fixtures. Much of tomorrow's news was known about weeks ago.
Press releases and announcements from government, companies, charities and universities.
Wire services, supplying a continuous feed that smaller outlets run largely unaltered.
Public institutions — courts, inquests, tribunals, planning applications, regulatory registers and published accounts. Court and council reporting is the traditional backbone of local journalism, and its decline is why so much now goes unreported.
Other media. Outlets follow each other constantly, which is why a story appears everywhere at once.
The sources that produce original work:
Contacts, built over years — the single most valuable asset a reporter has, and the reason specialists outperform generalists.
Freedom of information requests, which take months and produce documents nobody intended to release.
Data, obtained, scraped or purchased and analysed for patterns — increasingly how large investigations begin.
Leaks and whistleblowers, which are rarer than assumed and require careful verification and source protection.
Readers, through tip lines and community contact, which local reporters rely on heavily.
Simply noticing. A price change, a closed building, a pattern in small announcements.
What turns information into a story. It must be new, true, relevant to that outlet's audience, and verifiable to the standard the outlet requires. A great deal of interesting information never runs because the second person will not confirm it.
Why so much coverage looks identical. Shared wires, shared press releases, shrinking staff and the diary system converge on the same material — which is exactly what the term churnalism describes.