Technology has made it easier than ever for reporters to connect with their sources, whether they’re across the street or halfway around the world. With so many digital recording options, it takes no more than a few clicks and swipes to record an interview with a source. The biggest problem reporters face when it comes to digital interviews, however, is how to deal with all the recorded content once the interview is over. Turning those audio files into useable text isn’t always easy. Transcription is a time-consuming and often costly part of the job.

While the presidential appointment process for a Supreme Court seat draws national attention, few take notice of federal judge appointments. There are hundreds of federal judges and these appointments, too, are for life. Because the judges wield significant power, they are at the core of a president’s legacy. 
Federal courts have jurisdiction over a wide variety of crimes and civil disputes outlined in the Constitution and other federal statutes, including election fraud, weapons trafficking and terrorism.

Experienced journalists use research to ground their work and fact-check claims made by politicians, policymakers and others. Many journalists, however, are not trained in research methods and statistical analysis. Some have difficulty differentiating between a quality study and a questionable one.
Click here to see the full tip sheet.

The unemployment rate gets most of the attention, but the monthly jobs report contains lots of other data that can provide a fuller picture of the economy.
Simply being out of work isn’t enough for a person to be counted as unemployed; he or she also has to be available to work and actively looking for work (or on temporary layoff). In any given month, the unemployment rate can rise or fall based not just on how many people find or lose jobs, but on how many join or leave the active labor force.

Munis, as they’re known, enable a state, county, city, housing authority or other local government to raise money for public projects — usually infrastructure. But unlike the bonds private firms sell to raise cash, the interest is free from federal income tax, meaning, in effect, that munis are federally subsidized. They are also often exempt from local taxes. These tax benefits allow issuers (also known as borrowers) to attract investors at lower rates; in financial parlance, it makes borrowing cheaper for local governments.

No matter how great your content is, if you don’t package it properly, few will read or share it. 
Writing a great headline and choosing a dynamic main image for every article matters more now than ever — on a crowded Facebook feed that’s already turning out link posts for video, you’re playing a zero-sum game for your audience’s attention. That headline and image are frequently all anybody’s going to look at.

So the city you cover is considering raising property taxes and your editor wants a story today. If you’re like many journalists, you didn’t get a lot of training in college on municipal budgets. Journalist’s Resource offers some great information for writing about property taxes, what readers need to know about an impending increase in their property taxes and calculations for showing the impact on individual property owners.

“Who” is a subject. “Whom” is an object. But in our fast-paced world, there often is not enough time to figure out whether something is a subject or an object, especially if you forgot how to do that. 
We often advocate a sort of test, where you flip the sentence around to determine whether you would use “he” or “him” in its place. If you would use “he,” it’s “who”; if “him,” then “whom.” Sexist though it is, it often works.

Pew Research Center regularly makes available the full datasets that underlie most of our reports. We typically do not publish the dataset at the same time as the report. That’s because it takes some time for us to complete all reporting for a given study and to clean and prepare the data for public release. 
There are two ways to locate available datasets.

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Investigative reporters turn routine observations, reports, tips and conversations into questions about the way the world works. Curiosity is the starting point for great stories. 
A Poynter coffee break course lists some places to begin. Check it out here:
http://www.poynter.org/2017/4-places-to-find-story-ideas-for-investigat…