Using Non-obvious Sources as a Journalist.

Finding a story you didn’t realise you were looking for.

As a practicing journalist I need to keep an ear open for new stories or interesting sources to follow. The most obvious sources for a story on, for example car theft, the most obvious source would be car-alarm manufacturers or specialist departments of the police who deal in car theft. These are brilliant sources that may get you a great article or story. The best stories are usually ones writers find by accident. As strange as this sounds this happens more often than you think. Going back to the car theft example, you may choose to look in Top Gear Magazine for an article that might already exist on advanced alarm and security systems on the market. This isn’t plagiarism (unless you copy the article, of course) but it is using the information you have gained from reading said article and applying it to your further research and even get a further source. A writer may even find something in the classifieds and possibly stumble upon a car that could have been stolen (not that anyone would advertise this). You could also try asking a car insurance company on how many theft claims they get, which may again lead to a totally different story.

I have heard of people finding obscure items in the classifieds that are worth more than what the seller is asking for. This could lead to writing about the rarity item and how the seller came to find it. A story I find rather interesting, being a ‘retro gamer’ was the discovery of a game that never had a general release, on the modern day equivalent of the classifieds page –eBay. The game in question is known as ‘Zelda III’ I won’t bore you with the details of the Legend Of Zelda game series but it is possibly Nintendo’s most popular franchise after Super Mario and Pokémon.

The story goes: a Canadian seller, who hasn’t been named since, found a plain grey NES cartridge at a flea market which was labelled ‘Legend Of Zelda III: The Triforce Saga’ with ‘Copyright Nintendo, 1990’ underneath. This was then reported on the gaming site Joystiq.com, and caused debate around the Internet hardcore gaming community and Zelda fan base. The listing had photos of the label and a shot of the opening screen on his television. The cartridge went for $3000 but nothing else has uncovered anything else about this game. Any Zelda or Nintendo fan will tell you the third instalment was called ‘Link To The Past’ and certain facts would point to this being bogus. Never the less a gaming website found a great story that created a lot of buzz and attention for the site from snooping around eBay for something that they didn’t realise existed.

In conclusion, it certainly pays to look for a source to a story where you usually would find something else. A good point to make would be that The Independent use sources such as specialist magazines and Universities as sources very frequently. So when looking for a good source to a good story you may find a great source where you least expect it and produce a great story.

Other Sources:
http://zeldawiki.org/Community:Zelda_III_Cartridge_Hoax

Randall, D The Universal Journalist (2005) p44-48