By Rodrigo Muzell
Zero Hora
Porto Alegre, Brazil
Hosted by The Philadelphia Inquirer

Right before I departed from Porto Alegre, I asked my director at Zero Hora for advice. I wanted to know if he needed me to learn something specific, and he said: “I just want you to keep your eyes open for anything new that we can use heFre. I’m up for trying anything.” He also pointed out to me some of the newest initiatives at Zero Hora, like having a photographer in the streets with a cell phone to get readers’ calls. The readers can give him tips about what’s happening in the city, and he’s been getting some good local stories. “I don’t know whether it’s going to work or not, but we have to try new things.”

I found out that in the U.S. the newspapers want to try new things, too. But the reality in the newsrooms is really difficult – the companies simply don’t have the resources to do it. My mentor at The Philadelphia Inquirer once took me to a room filled with cameras and other multimedia devices. When I noticed a record sheet that stated the last time someone got any equipment was five months before, he explained: “people that used to do this kind of thing [multimedia work] were laid off.”

They simply don’t have enough people to do good in-depth journalism and to present it in new, creative, hi-tech ways. So they chose good journalism. For instance, if you have any online idea, there are only two guys in the newsroom to make it work – at Zero Hora, the online team has 30 people.

With all these challenges, the most important thing I’ve learned is how to turn my ideas into stories in a busy and complex newsroom. The high rate of pro-activity demanded to work in such environment made me rethink my own workflow, and I found a lot of inefficiency. In my visit at Forbes.com, the editor Carl Lavin stated that journalists can’t afford to be inefficient anymore, because people are demanding way more from them than before.

The challenge of writing in a foreign language to a new audience, however, helped me to find the solutions.

Because of my weak English and lack of confidence in reporting here, I had to practically start from scratch and do things very carefully. After every interview, I would go over the tape to get exact quotes because my note-taking in English is slow. By doing that, I would end up writing a lot along the way – I had quotes and attributions for each source. When I had to write the final copy, it was only a matter of putting it all together. My pieces came out faster and more accurately.

The major learning was how to plan a story. Again, being a foreigner led me to develop a better way to do this. Let me give you an example from my first story. My mentor gave me a tip about a big line of people near a subway station where free food was distributed every Tuesday. He gave me a handout with the name of the group that distributes the food. In the past I would just call the guys and go there. But since I didn’t know anything about the city, I had to research the group to see if there were previous stories about them. I talked to the poverty reporter here and got some background about food stamps and food banks. Then I had to research the food banks and to learn what they exactly do and how they are organized. I did all of it before going to the streets to interview people.

Just to have a clue about any issue demanded a lot of research, and I figured that this effort resulted in more contextualized stories. Instead of a telling only about the group that distributes the food and people who receive it, the story explains what’s happening with the food banks that use groups like that to help people.

In May, I attended the Investigative Reporting and Editors Conference in Baltimore. There, I talked to seasoned reporters about their techniques, got other tips at the panels and slowly figured out my own way to organize a story idea. Planning it from the beginning allowed me to work on a bigger story later on about recycling. I talked to over 15 sources, and here’s the method I’m using now. I am using the recycling story as an example.

1) Research the clips: The general idea was to see what’s being done in recycling here. I looked at Inquirer stories about it since 2005. In the last published story, it was reported the city had set up a recycling goal for 2009.
2) Researching the internet. At city’s website, I learned that Philadelphia had achieved the goal, and that The Inquirer hadn’t reported it.
3) Finding a focus. I decided to explain what this goal means to the city. I defined two major lines of research: the economy of recycling (it saves taxpayers money) and the importance of it for the environment. I knew I would have to find citizens to tell me their doubts about it and how important the matter is to them.
4) Talking to the editor. After all that work, I pitched the story to the editors. I had the increased rate to tell them, which was enough to justify the story, and I told them what I wanted to do. The editor had some doubts about the subject, so we discussed what sources I should use and questions I should answer for the reader.
5) Get to the sources. From there, it is a regular reporter’s work.

Obviously, my situation at The Inquirer was unusual: I didn’t have a tight deadline, nor was I pushed to finish the story quickly as happens in my home newsroom. When you are in your home city, this planning takes much less time because you already know the shortcuts. Structuring my thinking and reporting, though, helps me to see what the story will look like way before it’s written. This will help if you are in the field covering breaking news: the information you post online will make a lot more sense to the reader.

This is an example of how the planning can be effective for a writer. But it is also extremely important to get things done in the newsroom. Since you will more and more to depend on a lot of your colleagues to make your stories better online, you need to have a well-shaped idea to begin with. You have to approach the graphic designer, or the photo editor, or the multimedia desk with something clear in your mind. They rely on you to tell them how the story is going to be written.

At the Poynter sessions, I had the idea of conducting sessions to encourage and guide young reporters in my newsroom to get their stories in the paper. After that, though, I figured that we all have to rethink our way of working in this new environment. When I get back to Brazil, I will suggest a series of meetings with the staff to exchange ideas and try to engage them to pursue better ways of doing our stories. I will try to set up weekly conversations, covering one subject per month. The first module can be about good planning for a story and how to effectively use this planning in the new platforms. For the second module I want to talk about the new possibilities with the web 2.0 apps. During my fellowship, I learned some really interesting ways to engage readers and to present more in-depth information.

I hope that new ideas can come out of these meetings, but that’s not my main goal. I just want to tell my colleagues about the importance of individual initiative these days. Journalists are too used to working with an assembly line model, where editors edit, reporters write and so on. If we rely only on the online team to make this transition, newspapers will continue to be one step behind. Newspapers need creativity and new ideas, and only if journalists get used to thinking about different ways of doing their stories, will this happen.

My real goal is broader and maybe impossible to measure in the short term. By setting up these series of meetings, I hope to get more people aware and interested in what’s going on – and help to create a culture in the paper in which everybody is entitled to have new ideas.

When I return home, I will approach my director, and he will want to know what good ideas I’m bringing. I will hand to him a bunch of interesting initiatives on citizen journalism, the use of geotagging in coverage and different approaches on graphics. But I could have gotten most of it in Brazil surfing the internet. The difference that AFPF made by bringing me here is that I could see in loco how static a newsroom can get if our minds don’t embrace change. And after learning how to make my way through this hurricane, I hope I’ll be able to make a difference at my newspaper.