Advanced Reporting ─ Essential Skills for 21st Century Journalism

News gathering is a large, complicated and often messy task that has traditionally been viewed by journalists as irretrievably idiosyncratic, best learned through trial and error. Advanced Reporting takes the opposite approach, focusing on reporting as a process of triangulation based on three essential activities: analyzing documents, making observations and conducting interviews. In this readable book, veteran journalism professor Miles Maguire shows how the best reporters use these three tools in a way that allows them to cross-check and authenticate facts, to reduce or eliminate unsupportable allegations and to take readers and viewers to a deeper level of insight and understanding.

This book will help to prepare students for a profession marked by increasing complexity and competition. To succeed in this environment, journalists must learn to make the most of digital media to intensify the impact of their work. At the same time, reporters must contend with a host of sophisticated public relations techniques while engaging with news audiences that no longer just consume journalism, but also collaborate in its creation. Discussion questions and exercises help students put theory into practice.

Miles Maguire is a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he teaches writing, editing and reporting. He has worked as a beat writer, columnist, Washington bureau chief and monthly magazine editor, and his innovative approach to journalism has been recognized in programs such as the Knight-Batten Awards and the Great Ideas for Teachers (GIFT) competition sponsored by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. His media scholarship and criticism have appeared in Folio:, American Journalism Review, Newspaper Research Journal, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Media Economics, The International Journal on Media Management and the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. He currently serves as an associate editor of Literary Journalism Studies.