Translated into more than a dozen languages, David Randall's handbook is an invaluable guide to the 'universals' of good journalistic practice for professional and trainee journalists worldwide. The updated fifth edition ensures its relevance to contemporary readers by addressing issues such as problems of 'de-skilling' in the media and new tools for digital research.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. What Makes A Good Reporter?
• Attitudes
• Character
• A great reporter
• Getting the right start
• 2. The Limitations of Journalism
• Owners’ priorities
• The journalistic culture
• Readers’ values
• 3. What Is News?
• What is news?
• News values
• News value factors
• A sliding scale for stories
• Beauty and news values
• A word about good news
• 4. Where Do Good Stories Come From?
• The habits of successful reporters
• Getting out and about
• News editors
• Non-obvious sources
• Other productive areas
• Stories that good reporters avoid
• 5. Research
• What you should be looking for
• Where to get it
• Researching online
• Printed sources
• Research as a foreign correspondent
• 6. Handling Sources, Not Them Handling You
• Guidelines for dealing with any source
• Official sources
• Handling unauthorised sources
• Unattributable sources ‘off the record’
• Getting too close to sources
• 7. Questioning
• How to approach people
• The most useful questions in journalism
• Questioning uneasy sources
• Questioning elusive, evasive and hostile sources
• Questioning by email
• Press conferences
• Celebrity interviews
• 8. Reporting Numbers and Statistics
• Questioning data
• The uses and abuses of statistics
• Averages
• Distribution
• Percentages
• Per head
• Surveys
• Opinion polls
• Correlation
• Projections
• Real versus apparent rise
• Probability
• Phoney science
• 9. Investigative Reporting
• What is investigative reporting?
• Productive areas to investigate
• Investigative reporting skills
• How to run investigative operations
• 10. How To Cover Major Incidents
• How to make sure your coverage of a disaster doesn't turn into one
• Death tolls
• The death call
• All reporters are tough, aren't they?
• 11. Mistakes, Corrections and Hoaxes
• Mistakes
• How should you respond to mistakes?
• Great newspaper hoaxes
• 12. Ethics
• General guidelines
• Grey areas
• 13. Writing for Newspapers
• Planning
• Clarity
• Fresh language
• Honesty
• Precision
• Suitability
• Efficiency
• Fluency
• Revision
• The joys of writing
• 14. Intros
• How to write sharp intros
• Hard news approach
• Other approaches
• A word about feature intros
• 15. Construction and Description
• Construction guidelines
• Analysing story structures
• Payoffs
• Attribution
• Description
• 16. Handling Quotes
• When do you use quotes?
• Accuracy
• Efficiency
• Attributing quotes
• Inventing quotes
• 17. Different Ways To Tell A Story
• Different approaches
• 18. Comment, Intentional and Otherwise
• Comment in news stories
• The big I
• Analysis
• Obituaries
• Leaders or editorial opinion pieces
• Columnists
• Reviews
• 19. How To Be A Great Reporter
• Hard work
• The application of intelligence
• Intellectual courage
• Meticulousness
• Consuming appetite for books
• A good knowledge of journalism's past
• Obsessive nature
• Reading for Journalists