Sarah Hann | Oct. 1, 2008
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| Photo by Sarah Hann |
| Mike Malik, B.A.J. ’06, related stories from the city government beat at the Lafayette Journal-Courier. |
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Malik, B.A.J. ’06, talked to students in associate professor Owen Johnson’s J200 Reporting, Writing and Editing I class, relating his experiences and sharing tips on working as a print reporter. He covers city government and said he talks to the same people, from city council members to the mayors, every day as he works to connect the average reader to stories he works on.
“Personal relationships will get you everywhere in this business,” Malik said. To create those, he keeps track of birthdays and major events in the lives of those he talks to daily and asks about his contacts’ personal lives as introductions to asking questions for a story.
He described the process he uses to get stories going, from getting ideas to making notes and outlines to getting the information he needs. At every step, organization is the key, he said.
Malik advised students to make good use of databases, which add both credibility and context to stories. He said all sorts of information, from parking tickets to text messages on government phones, are public record and that the city is legally obligated to hand them over. Sometimes, city officials don’t like this.
“If no one’s mad at you, you’re not doing your job,” Malik said.
He suggested ways to get people to give information. First, ask the right questions, he said. For one of his stories, he said, he made the mistake of asking grocery store managers if they were planning to move to West Lafayette. He later realized that, since the city and the store managers were still in talks, he would get better information by asking if the managers were in talks to move.
His other advice to the students included finding a paper trail; becoming friendly with secretaries, since they know much of what goes on in a department; working for student media to gain experience; and giving a beginning job four or six months before deciding they hate it, since first jobs in journalism are hard.
As for writing, Malik relied on advice he probably heard when he was in J201: “Try to explain something in the simplest way possible.”
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