Note taking for me has always been defined by deadline — the tighter it is, the more my notes tend to reflect immediate needs: the in/out cues of the best potential quotes, the most important facts/statistics that I’ll need RIGHT NOW.  I needed to make sure I’d have the quotes I’d need without even looking at the media.  (I used to sync the camera with my watch during extremely tight deadline press conference, so time code would be time of day. There are now software packages that will do the same thing.)

If I have a little room to breathe, my notes reflect how I think the story might best be told: you’ll see rough outlines suggesting the beginning, middle and end of the story, and the best, rough sentences that occur to me during the gathering process. And ideas for a standup bridge – if necessary.

I often organize my story by using a list of boxes, representing the best video moments/settings/bites — matched with whatever information I may want to share within each “box.”  For example, a story about airport landing fees/taxes might have a box for an amazing shot of 747 landing over our heads, coupled with a statistic: 32 foreign flights land in American airports every second of every working day.  Then there will be another box representing a interview with a Federal Tax Policy Specialist, etc.  I started organizing stories this way from the very beginning, and I realize now it reflected my interest in writing from and for whatever video I had, instead of the other way around.

As a television journalist I often have a video backup of many interviews, so that relieves the pressure of note taking if my deadline is not tight.  In local news, I always had a tape recorder that I would use for every interview.  As a national magazine correspondent, I almost never needed a tape recorder — the deadlines were far enough away that we would have complete written transcripts in our hands before I began viewing raw tape or writing.

Here are two shots of my notebooks from recent stories.  On the right you’ll notice all I’m really writing down are proper spellings, ages and specific numbers about the number of hours the people work at their jobs:  ”16 – 23″, how premature their baby was: “18 months” and how much in debt they are in medical bills: ”30K”  On the left you’ll see how sparse my notes can be, I only wrote down a favorite quote that I knew was off camera that I didn’t want to forget.  (The director of a Wild Mustang Rescue operation said, “I have the best job in the worst location in America.”  Beneath that, all I am writing down are specific events that I want to research or look up later: in Ohio, Pomona, CA, and northern Nevada.

Lastly, I try not to bury myself in my notebook when listening to people. I think it much more important to connect with them.  I’ll often rewrite or organize my notes immediately after and interview, or at lunch, or at night in the hotel room.  Unless it is numbers, titles, spellings that I might forget.  Also, sometimes my scribbles are so random, they’ll make sense to me for about a week — but will be incomprehensible if I look at them a year later. Not good, but they seem to get the job done.

“Leave the notebook at home.” That’s what one journalism site recommended when reviewing Evernote, a digital service that stores notes, pictures and Web clips online so users can access them anywhere from any device. It’s a cool tool but it hasn’t replaced my reporter’s notebook and I don’t think it ever will.

A pad and pen are still the most convenient way I’ve found to take notes on assignment. They’re super portable, reliable in all kinds of conditions and never need recharging.

I’ve worked in broadcast news almost my entire career, so I’ve always recorded interviews for radio or television. But as photojournalist Rich Murphy says, “A camera is not a notebook” and shouldn’t be used like one. People who rely on digital recorders instead of taking notes have to go back and listen to everything again to find the sound bites or quotes they’ll use in a story. That’s a huge time suck, and in every newsroom I’ve worked in there’s simply no time to waste.

So how do you take good notes? Like most people, I learned to take notes in school but soon discovered that what worked for me in class didn’t fit my needs as a reporter. As a student, I wrote down pretty much everything the professor said and reviewed my notes later to figure out what was important. As a journalist, I learned to listen for what was most important in an interview and just write that part down. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I learned to distinguish what was NOT important and left that part out.

These notes are from an interview I did in 2009. Can I still read them? Absolutely. The part I’ve starred reads: ”What we found is people recuperate and keep going. When you’re doing something, making a difference, you don’t get burned out.”

I never learned shorthand but I developed my own abbreviations to save time, picking up ideas from colleagues along the way. I use a dash for “not” or a negative, for example, and an underline to signify “ing” at the end of a word. I leave out a lot of letters. Lower case “e” is “we” and “pl” is “people.” Many years before texting became a verb, I was using the same abbreviations in my notes that many people now use on their smartphones: “u” for “you” and “yr” for “your.” One other speed trick I learned from CBS’s Byron Pitts: I now put a rubber band around the cover and all the used pages so that when I can quickly open the notebook to a clean page. No more flipping!

My goal in taking notes for a today story is to produce something that is clear enough to read live on the air and concise enough to let me review the high points of a 20-minute interview in a minute or two. If I’m turning a story on a short deadline, I mark the time-code from the camera or recorder in my notebook as I’m writing things down, so I can find the exact bite I’m looking for quickly and transcribe it verbatim. A transcript is essential, and not just because it’s going to be posted online. It’s critically important to know precisely what someone said so you can write in and out of the bite.

Notebooks aren’t just for interviews, of course. I write down lots of stuff besides quotes: things said off camera or off the record (which I mark OTR); things I notice or lines I might use (which I put in brackets); questions or ideas to follow up on later (which get a ?).

That’s my system, such as it is. What’s yours?

One strategy when faced with a non-visual story or a story that would typically be told with predictable images is to think of an analogy that can bring the story to life. What does this situation or process remind you of? Ask your sources for ideas. Can you compare it to something that people are already familiar with?

One of my all-time favorite stories illustrated this way explained the physics behind a NASCAR crash. The driver survived because his car hit a wall with a glancing blow, not head-on. WGHP’s Bob Buckley showed what happens when a tomato hits a wall the same way–splat for a head-on collision, but only a split skin for a glancing blow. Trust me, it was both visual and memorable.

The same basic strategy–comparing something you can’t really see to something you can–helped NPR produce a memorable story when the earth’s population reached seven billion. Instead of relying on the usual images of babies and crowded streets, NPR found a great analogy and produced a video to illustrate it online.

The reason this strategy works is that it employs what I like to call the velcro theory of news. News is just information unless it sticks to something you already have, at which point it becomes knowledge and understanding. Try using an analogy for a non-visual story, if you haven’t already. And please point us to more examples of stories that put this principle to work so we can share them.

Using Facebook for a TV investigation: Proof that social media are great reporting tools.

Digital note-taking tools: A review of free and low-cost software to help you keep track of information.

How to learn social media skills at mid-career: A three-point plan for getting up to speed on social media.

Is there any hope for quality in local TV news?: Review of a documentary that paints a gloomy picture.

Why journalists should learn to love data: Tips and tools for working with data that can lead you to great stories.

Do-it-yourself interactive graphics: How to use ManyEyes.

Recommended journalism textbooks: Originally posted in 2008, an updated list leading off with the second edition of Advancing the Story.

Secrets of the TV stations of the year: The shared newsroom culture and personal connections behind the three 2011 winners.

How to interview children: A tip sheet on how to talk to kids on camera.

Resolve to be a more enterprising reporter: What is takes to turn better stories (posted on New Year’s Eve 2010).

What did I learn by looking back at this list? It seems pretty obvious that tips and how-to posts are most popular with NewsLab regulars, so one of my goals for this year is to bring you more of what you’re looking for. If you have specific requests, please let me know.

In the meantime, here’s to a terrific 2012.

This was the year that Al Jazeera English made its mark in the U.S. with its coverage of the Arab Spring, says the Huffington Post. It was also a terrible year for NPR, as top bosses were ousted and the network got a big story terribly wrong–falsely reporting the death of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Biggest interview scoops of 2011? HuffPo gives credit for most of its top 10 to TV networks, with ABC in the lead for snagging the first interview with Giffords, among others. Also on the list, NBC’s Bob Costas’ interview with ex-Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, which Costas later said came as a complete surprise and was set up at the last minute by Sandusky’s lawyer. Maybe it belongs in a different category: scoops that fall in your lap.

In television, it was a year of departures, says Tom Jicha of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. In TV news, he highlights the end of Katie Couric’s less than stellar five-year run as anchor of the CBS Evening News. I’d add a few more.

• Meredith Vieira stepped down from NBC’s Today Show, also after five years. “It wasn’t working for me in terms of my personal life,” she said.
• Christiane Amanpour was eased out as host of ABC’s This Week just over a year into her tenure with the broadcast still mired in third.
• Keith Olbermann, unceremoniously dumped by MSNBC, found a new home for Countdown, doing the same shtick for fewer viewers, on Current TV.
• Glenn Beck, boycotted by advertisers, parted ways with Fox News and started his own Web channel.

So many anchors and reporters left CNBC this year, one critic wondered about “brain drain.” And there was one more memorable departure–Andy Rooney, the longtime curmudgeon-commentator for CBS’s 60 Minutes, died in November.

Broadcast-related entries on Mashable’s list of top digital journalism events include the rise to Twitter stardom of NPR’s Andy Carvin and a new emphasis on mobile delivery, calling CNN’s acquisition of the iPad app Zite ”arguably the biggest mobile move by a news organization.”

The list of biggest journalism gaffes of the year, courtesy of HuffPo, includes several recent whoppers, including Fox News’ use of an Obama photo to illustrate GOP poll results and NBC’s Chuck Todd flipping the bird on air. There were plenty of local screw-ups too, including the Minnesota anchor whose slurring newscast video went viral who was later arrested for DWI. And the Minneapolis station “investigation” that claimed dog meat was for sale in New York’s Chinatown apparently based on a reporter’s having misheard the word “duck.”

For my in-depth take on more serious trends in local TV news, you’ll have to wait just a bit longer. I’m writing that chapter again for the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual report, The State of the News Media, due out in March.

Every reporter eventually runs into a story so important that it’s worth getting the information on a confidential basis. But you’d better understand your news organization’s position on unnamed sources before you make any promises.

Many newsrooms require a supervisor’s approval before confidentiality can be ensured. That usually means the boss will need to know the source’s identity, and the source should be aware of that before making any deals. But how many others in your news organization will be told the name of your source? And how far will your bosses go to support a confidentiality agreement? Will they protect you from having to turn over notebooks or raw tape? Will they pay for your legal defense if you’re found in contempt for not disclosing the identity of a source?

At a recent IRE workshop, Josh Meyer of the Medill National Security Zone emphasized the importance of establishing ground rules up front that apply to both journalists and their sources. “Let them know that if you find at any point that they have lied to you or misrepresented the facts, the deal may be off,” he said.

Lawyer Bert Bruser, counsel to the Toronto Star, advised journalists to avoid leaving any paper trail that could identify a source. Don’t write the name in your notes, he said, don’t mention it in email, and get rid of any documents with the source’s name on them.

Better yet, don’t quote or refer to unnamed sources in your stories. Instead, “use anonymous sources to point you toward key documents, data or story ideas,” panelists said.

One other obvious piece of advice: make sure you and your source agree on what you mean by the words you use when discussing ground rules. I’m always taken aback by the number of journalists and officials who think “background” means “off the record” and vice versa. This glossary of interviewing terms covers the most common ground rules.

Be aware, too, of the perception by some PR professionals that there really is no such thing as “off the record” and who may be counseling the people they advise not to provide any information on that basis.

“If you don’t really love doing it, you’re not going to do well,” she said in an NPPA interview. “It’s such a monster that you battle every day. You have to be so many things in a day.”

Here’s one of Michael’s prize-winning stories, a story that she says changed her life because “it showed me a lot about what people are willing to give up and do for other people.” It’s also an example of the value of listening. Michael says she met the man in the story when he demanded to see her ID as she entered a government building. She had to put down all her gear to find it. She wasn’t all that happy to see him again on her way out, but when he asked if she wanted to hear his story, she stopped long enough to hear what he had to say.

Michael does plenty of stories like that without a stand-up, but when she does decide to include one she spends a great deal of time setting up and shooting it. The result is often a multi-part stand-up, like the one in this story.

Did you count the number of shots in that stand-up? How long do you think it took Michael to get that done, working alone? Here’s the answer, in a behind-the-scenes look at how she produced that stand-up:

Thanks, Michelle Michael, for sharing your work and showing what it takes to do it well.

Donahue’s is just one of the voices in a new documentary, “Running on Empty: The Brain Drain in Local TV News,” produced by two Quinnipiac University journalism professors, Karin and Bill Schwanbeck. If it sounds like an unrelievedly gloomy look at local television news, that’s about half right. Former reporters and news directors paint a grim picture of a business content to replace experienced journalists with cheaper, less capable rookies–a business that largely refuses to invest in quality. According to the Schwanbecks, only four of 40 stations in the top ten markets give investigative journalists time to cover stories in depth: WFAA and KDFW in Dallas, and KHOU and KTRK in Houston.

The film doesn’t stop there. It also examines some efforts to change the paradigm, including non-profit journalism centers and online sites. But it’s clear that those efforts alone won’t fill the gap.

Producer Karin Schwanbeck says she hopes the documentary will spur some change, possibly an effort by the FCC to hold stations more accountable. But she admits she’s not optimistic. “I’m not sure if it’s too late,” she says. “The genie is out of the bottle and I’m not sure if we can put the genie back.”

Given that assessment, why is she still preparing young would-be journalists for jobs that might not exist? Because, Schwanbeck says, she hopes they’ll be the ones who might be able to make a difference. “As Dan Rather would say, ‘You have to learn to write and you have to learn to fight.’”

Planning means everything from setting up interviews to selecting the right gear for a particular shoot. For Steve Noviello, consumer reporter for KDFW in Dallas, it means thinking about what he’d like the story to look like on the air and sharing his ideas with the photographer he’s working with.

At a recent journalism workshop sponsored by the Texas Association of Broadcasters, Noviello shared a couple of stories that benefited from careful planning. For a story about a woman who’s a champ at saving money by coupon-clipping, Noviello wanted to use quick edits and speeded up video to reflect the woman’s frantic pace. “We needed twice as much B-roll as normal because we were going to double speed it,” he says.  For a story about a late-night designated-driver service, Noviello knew he’d need video shot from a moving car. Planning ahead allowed him to use a colleague’s convertible, not a news vehicle. The story won a National Headliner Award for best TV feature.

Noviello started in the news business 13 years ago as a one-man-band, which he says taught him the greatest lessons he’s ever learned. What would those be? Watch our interview, in which he also talks more about his approach to planning:

So says Laurie Oakes, political editor of Australia’s Nine Network, in a media lecture that’s full of interesting stuff. His comment struck me, in part, because I’d just finished reading a Q-and-A in SPJ’s Quill Magazine with ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his series on “The Wall Street Money Machine.” Eisinger was asked how he overcomes roadblocks when people don’t want to talk to him.

I’m very clear and up front with people, and I lay out what I’m working on very clearly to them. I have an excess of disclosure and explanation of what I’m doing with them to reassure them that I’m serious and careful. And I think that persuades people. I think that they have a bad idea of what journalists are up to, and if you emphasize and then show them that you are extremely careful and you want to be fair and accurate, I think that builds trust with them even if they know that you’ve got evidence of things that don’t make them look good.

Sneaky, Eisinger is not. But is it ever OK for a journalist to be sneaky? It probably depends on what you think that term means. As far as Oakes is concerned, he says he was being sneaky when he asked a question of a source that appeared to be based on hard information but was really just conjecture about a pending appointment.

“When will Gair take up his diplomatic post?” Shocked silence at the other end of the line. Then: “How did you know about that?” Bingo. Sure it was subterfuge, but subterfuge in the public interest.

That doesn’t strike me as underhanded. He’d identified himself as a journalist and was just fishing for information. So if that’s the definition of sneaky, I guess I’m for it. How about you?