Notebooks Before Deadlines

Most reporters treat the notebook as a container for whatever happens once the reporting starts. Open it up on the morning of an interview and the first entry is usually the interview itself — a name, a time, a location. Nothing wrong with that, except it means the notebook only ever records the story you already decided to chase.

A better habit, and one we return to often in Story Idea Development sessions, is writing something before the reporting begins: what you expect to find, what you're unsure about, and what would change your mind. It sounds like a small thing. In practice it does two jobs at once.

The page that keeps you honest

First, it keeps you honest about your own assumptions. If you write down what you expect a source to say before you speak to them, you have something to check your notes against afterward. Reporters who skip this step often don't notice when a source has told them exactly what they expected to hear — because there was no earlier version of "expected" written down to compare it to.

Second, that first page becomes useful on the days when the story stalls. A reporter with three weeks of notes and no clear line home can usually find, on the very first page, a version of the question they set out to answer. It's often clearer than whatever they've been carrying in their head since.

"The first page is the only place in the notebook where you're allowed to be wrong out loud."

What actually belongs there

There's no fixed formula, but a few things tend to earn their place: the specific question you're trying to answer, not the general subject; two or three things that would count as evidence either way; and a short note on who you haven't spoken to yet and why that might matter. None of this needs to be tidy. It needs to exist.

None of this replaces good reporting once you're in the field. But it does mean that when the story is finished, you can look back at where you started and see, in your own handwriting, whether the piece answers the question you actually set out to ask — or a different, easier one that happened to be nearby.