Why Pitching News Stories is the Best Part of a Journalist's Job
Description
In Chapter 3 of 9, reporter Yoav Gonen shares how using motivation and imagination contributes to his favorite part of the job: pitching stories. Journalism provides Gonen the platform to explore, investigate and probe, then pitch the stories. For Gonen, there is nothing quite like connecting his curiosity to the proposal.
Transcript
Capture Your Flag Erik Michielsen: When you’re not reporting on tigers and in home apartments, there are so many different elements of being a journalist that seem very exciting. There's the element of you know finding the story, there’s the element of pursuing the story and developing the narrative through conversations and almost the investigative component. And then of course there’s the element of actually being under a dead line and being able to have to close something by certain times, so it can make the papers the next day. You know what do you like the most of those, okay how do you approach those when you think about what drives from day to day? Yoav Gonen: You know the best part of the job is when you get to pick your own stories. So it’s really up to your imagination and your interests. When I was working at the Staten Island in advance, I had, I was doing general on assignment work, I had a little bit more liberty and I pitched the story on the public housing complexes. There were something like 18 on Staten Island, I knew some of them were going through particular periods of violence and I was just curious what it’s like living in that environment. I pitched the story, they said okay and then for the next month to six weeks, you know, whenever I wasn’t doing daily stories, I’d head out to the projects, I would walk in the hallways and that’s I saw somebody. I mean, my basic question was like you know, what it’s like to live here? What are the good things, what are the bad things? And to me that’s the greatest thing about journalism is it gives me a right to do that. I mean anyone else who is curious about that they can’t just go there and start asking questions because people are going to say what the hell are you doing you know. This gives me the license when people say well why are you asking me? I can just say because I’m a reporter.