Landing an assignment, especially a feature, is an exciting moment for any early-career journalist. But what happens next in the reporting, writing, and editing phases can sometimes be ambiguous. This adapted version of The Open Notebook’s writers’ guidelines is just one example of the norms and expectations for journalists after they receive an assignment.
Some of the guidelines you’ll see below, such as how much you can change quotes, what to share with sources, and common writing pitfalls, can help you prepare for any assignment, not just one for TON. These tips might also serve as a jumping-off point for other outlets who want to craft guidelines of their own.
Editors’ note: These guidelines have been edited to remove staff email addresses and other details that are particular to TON’s policies.
What makes a TON story work
The keys to the success of TON’s stories are that they:
- Are focused tightly on issues of craft
- Contain a good deal of granular, concrete detail
- Offer strategies and tools that people can take away and apply to their own work
- Do not simply lay out challenges and problems, but attempt to show how others have coped with and/or found solutions to those challenges
Navigating deadlines
We need you to do your utmost to meet your deadlines. Once scheduled, our stories hew to a tight editorial and production timeline. Typically, at least 5 people (including you) are involved in the production of every story, and more if the story is also translated into Spanish. This means that we depend on you to meet your deadlines and to communicate promptly about any anticipated delays in the writing, editing, or fact-checking stages. Not doing so leads to production delays, increases the risk of errors being introduced into rushed copy, and requires members of our team and/or other freelancers to adjust their schedules to compensate.
Sourcing stories
- Reported features at TON usually include about 5 to 8 sources (though as with any piece of reporting, it’s not unusual that the reporter speaks with more people than are quoted).
- Sources may be journalists or other experts in whatever the topic at hand is. (Most often, the best sources for our stories are journalists, editors, and journalism instructors, as opposed to academic experts.)
- Please include sources with relevant expertise/experience who represent historically underrepresented communities and perspectives, as well as sources outside the U.S., including in the Global South. Our audience is increasingly international, and we want to serve that audience and see them represented in our stories.
- You can use The Open Notebook’s Science Writers Database to identify potential sources for your stories. Obviously, you should not assume that anyone in the database is necessarily a suitable source for your story, but we hope this will be a meaningful starting point for you.
- We are making a particular effort to increase representation of sources from Latin America to reflect our extensive readership from that region. Toward that end, we’ve lined up a paid advisory group of Latin American journalists who can help our writers find sources with relevant experience/expertise. Feel free to email a few people in this group if you are looking for suggestions for sources from Latin America for any given story.
- If you are struggling to find diverse or international sources, please feel free to ask your editor for help.
- Work hard to include voices who are new to TON. Although science writing is a small community, there is plenty of room to include a wide range of voices, and we should not need to include the same few dozen people over and over again.
- Avoid over-representing any one publication through your sourcing. There are countless publications that carry stories about science, so there should be no need to restrict your sourcing to representatives of just one or two publications.
Mechanics of working with sources
- Please try to conduct interviews by phone or Zoom (or in person if possible, though that’s rare). Only resort to email interviews in exceptional cases, or for minor follow-ups/ clarifications. If you do have comments that were provided in an email, please note that in your story (“so-and-so wrote in an email”).
- Do not show your copy to sources. If you need to check the accuracy of something you’ve written, please share only paraphrased material, by phone or by email, and make sure to be clear that you are checking on the factual accuracy of the material, not asking the source to “check” or “edit” your story.
Our policy on changing quotes
Do not change or “clean up” quotes from your sources, even if doing so would improve the sentence. If your sources’ exact words do not communicate their thoughts clearly enough, please paraphrase or ask them to make their point again using different wording.
Exceptions to this rule:
- You can remove words such as “um” or “like.”
- You can remove word/phrase repetitions that amount to verbal “stumbles” (e.g., “We traveled down the Nile, the Nile River” or “I don’t think … don’t think so”).
- You can clean up cases where a source rephrases their sentence as they’re starting it (e.g., “I don’t think…I’m not aware of any data that supports that.”).
Common writing pitfalls to avoid
- Issues with the nut graf:
- There is no nut graf.
- Clichéd, hackneyed, or clunky setups leading into the nut graf, such as:
- “To learn more about X, I asked four journalists and two editors XYZ thing.”
- “So how do science journalists do X? It turns out…”
- “The good news is that …”
- “Below, I outline four ways that TKTKTK …”
- Nut graf is too scanty/thin, providing too little a sense of what the story is all about and why our readers should care.
- Strings of anecdotes or arguments with no real structural arc.
- Sources express opinions but the story does not provide enough context or factual support/documentation to back up those opinions.
- Entire sections of the story are based on only one source (this may occasionally be fine, but is often a sign of an under-developed story).
- Quotes are difficult to parse (giving a sense that there was more to the conversation that the reader isn’t privy to, making it hard to follow the meaning).
What to expect during the editing process
Most of our stories go through at least several rounds of editing and top-editing, as well as fact-checking and copyediting. When the editor feels the story is ready for top edit, they’ll send it to the top editor. You’ll see it again after that, during both the top-editing and the copy-editing process.
Features will also be sent to an independent fact-checker, and you will need to provide an annotated version of your story and related reporting material for the fact-checker.
Our fact-checking process
All reported features for The Open Notebook are sent to an independent fact-checker, normally after the story is in near-final form and is heading to copyedit. For Q&As and other non-feature TON resources, you should fact-check every factual detail in the story.
To fact-check with sources, send an email with the subject line along the lines of “Quick fact-checking” so they’ll respond quickly. In the email, present a list of items you want to check, describing the gist of the idea but nothing verbatim. Please do not show copy to sources. Share only paraphrased material, by phone or by email, and make sure to be clear that you are checking on the factual accuracy of the material, not asking the source to “check” or “edit” your story.
What should you check?
- People’s names/spellings/pronouns/job titles
- Locations
- Institution names/spellings
- Numbers
- Physical descriptions of people, places, and things
- Analogies and metaphors
- Story headlines/spellings/publication dates/publication names
- Hyperlinks
- Statements about events, historical facts, trends, circumstances, superlatives (e.g., “Many researchers say X,” “It’s increasingly common for publications to do X,” “The ferry ran twice a week,” “The species went extinct in 1920,” “She has been an editor at X publication for 10 years,” “It’s the oldest/youngest/first/largest X,” etc.)
- The content of any quotes or paraphrased sentences from sources
- The content of all information gathered from reporting not attributed to sources as quotes or paraphrased sentences (i.e., information synthesized from one or more sources of reporting)
To check the general wording of material quoted in an interview, you can use your recording or transcript as backup. If you do not have an accurate, verbatim transcript, you’ll need to check more closely with the source. To fact-check specific factual statements, you can either research certain facts online or ask the source for verification.
Annotating features for fact-checking
For reported features, please create an annotated copy of your story (see annotated example text here) for the fact-checker. The fact-checker should be able to clearly follow your reporting process. You should also be available for follow-up questions throughout the fact-check. Here’s how you to annotate your story:
- Every fact in the story (not just quotes from sources) should have either a footnote or comment with the relevant source information that corresponds to your reporting material.
- Whether you are using auto-generated transcriptions or transcribing by hand, make sure that passages being quoted in the story are fully and correctly transcribed.
- When referencing interview transcripts as backup for direct quotes, include page numbers or timestamps in your annotation and flag the corresponding spots in the interview transcript where that part of the interview occurred.
- When referencing interview transcripts as backup for paraphrased material, you do not need to include timestamps; you can just indicate which interview the paraphrased material is from.
- For facts that are backed up in other documents, articles, social media pages, videos, podcasts, web pages, etc., provide the link and page number or time stamp.
Include with your annotated story any reporting material corresponding to the footnotes/comments in your annotated story (interview transcripts, PDFs, other documents) and a list of your sources and their email addresses.
Collecting demographic information about your sources
The Open Notebook is committed to including diverse sources in our stories so that we can accurately capture the range of people whose voices, perspectives, and expertise are relevant to our stories. Toward that end, we track information about who our sources are. Participating in this process is completely optional for sources, and they do not have to answer some or any of the questions if they don’t want to.
What we track:
- What country the source lives in
- Race/ethnicity
- Gender identity
- LGBTQ+ affiliation
- Disability/accessibility needs
We also give the source an opportunity to elaborate on any of the above.
You can collect this information from your sources in one of two ways:
- While you’re on the phone with your source (either at the end of your initial interview or when you are fact-checking, later)
- After your interview, you can email an invitation and list of the questions to each source.
In case of abuse or harassment
In the unlikely event that you or any of your sources experience any form of online abuse or harassment while you’re reporting or writing your story or after it’s published, please know that The Open Notebook will have your back. If you have any particular concerns in advance, do let your editors know and we will work with you to make sure that we’ve done everything possible to support you and deal with it. If you think you or a source may be experiencing harassment (even if you’re not sure), please let your editor know as soon as possible.
This guide was adapted from The Open Notebook’s internal Writers’ Guidelines for Reported Features and Writers’ Guidelines for Q&A Interviews. Many thanks to Emma Gometz for adapting this guide for publication.