Writer's Block

Good tip, bad tip

While I spend a lot of my working hours covering meetings or paging through reports, without a doubt, all my best stories have come from tips.

When I first became a reporter I was very intrigued by this whole tip business. How does one get a tip? Does one ask for the tip, or wait for a tipster to come forward on his or her own? And how exactly was I supposed to "cultivate" my sources, without feeling dorky and/or sleazy?

What I didn't realize then was that the tips don't start coming right away -- or for the first couple of years, in my case. There's nothing you can do to to force the tips to flow, but if people get to know you, and they know that you're willing to listen and can be trusted to be fair and discrete, they'll naturally start giving you tips on their own.

My personal experience has been that the best tips come in person, and usually as an afterthought to another conversation. I was speaking to a school group a few years ago, and afterward ended up chatting with one of the parents. After a lot of small-talk, she dropped a tidbit that caught my attention. I met with her at her home a few days later to find out as much detail as I could about what she knew, then went out and did most of the research on my own. The story I broke ended up getting circulated around the country -- I even heard a version on NPR one morning when I was driving to work.

Now that I've been working for a while, the problem isn't in finding tips for stories, it's separating the few good tips from the many unhelpful ones. I get so frustrated when someone gives me a tip I can't use, because I feel like I'm letting the person down by not following-up on it.

Unhelpful tips are too general to give me an idea of what the actual story would be, and contain no facts that I can use to follow-up or start investigating. They may not be timely, or may have no local connection. It may be a story that is so ambitious we don't have the time or money resources to do it at a small paper like The Maui News.

All-too common examples of tips I can't do anything with include:
>"You should really write a story about how Maui is getting so overdeveloped." (Too general.)
>"Company X is developing a giant photovoltaic array in Arizona. You should do a front-page story about it, because I think Maui should have one too." (No local connection, unless such a system is proposed for Maui by someone in a position to actually make it happen.)
>"Why don't you investigate X council member? I don't have any specific information that he/she is corrupt, but if you looked into it, I'm sure you'd find something. Come to think of it, you should really investigate all the council members. I just know some of them have to be dirty." (No facts I can check.)

In contrast, useful tips are specific, have clear importance to the community and include concrete information I can use to follow-up. They might reveal information reporters couldn't get on their own or might not notice without help from an insider.
Examples:
>(real) "Hey, did you know sand mining has almost used up the island's sand supply? The county has a report on it, but it hasn't been released because the report is a draft."
>(hypothetical) "Hey, did you know Public Official X is taking kickbacks on government contracts? He/she is trying to cover it up, but here's how you can see the money trail in the contract records."
>(hypothetical) "Hey, you should do a story on developers who promise to make certain improvements in order to get approvals, then don't do the improvements. Here's an example."

There are always so many story ideas on my pile that I just don't have time to go on long fishing expeditions based on tips that don't point me in the right direction or promise I'll actually get a story for my trouble. But tips with clear news value, with enough information to show me that digging further will yield results, will always rise to the top of my list.