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BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach
you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to talk
about where we find stories. You need a story idea or something to talk about long before
you get to 6 o'clock in the evening. You don't have anything to talk about, you don't have
a story. So where do you find stories? There are a lot of different places you can find
stories especially your own life. You have friends, you have family. They all have different
professions. They all have different hobbies, and many of those things are very interesting.
Your uncle is in--let's say your uncle is an accountant. How would you relate that to
the budget? What's going on with the budget? The state budget every January, they talk
about--in the state of the state, the governor talks about the state budget. Well, cities
have budgets. Government--and all the stuff kind of spawns other ideas. So you find these
stories in your own life, in the lives of your family and friends and in more mundane
areas like if you're hurting for an idea, pick through the newspaper. There's a lot
of information in the newspaper about a lot of different subjects. Many of those subjects
can spawn new story ideas in your own head. There are also great many news services out
there available to reporters to help them find other ideas. For example the AP wires,
everywhere in the world, there is a reporter somewhere typing out a story on a computer.
And he shares that with every other reporter, just like we share our ideas and our stories
with other reporters around the world. And those information ends up on the AP wire which
you can use to generate new ideas. There's other TV stations; you might look at what
your competition is doing. That might spawn a new idea or a new angle on a different story.
So there's the Internet. The Internet is full of everything you can imagine. If you can
think of it, it's probably on the Internet somewhere. So spawn around through different
areas of the Internet looking for different ideas on business and politics and crime,
on just any kind of fun and interesting thing that you might find interesting or that your
friends or family might find interesting and take those ideas and think about how to turn
them into stories.