1. What makes a good reporter? Attitudes -- Character -- A great reporter -- Getting the right start -- 2. The limitations of journalism: Owners' priorities -- The journalistic culture -- Readers' values -- 3. What is news?: News values -- News value factors -- A sliding scale for stories -- Beauty and news values -- A word about good news -- 4. Where do good stories come from?: The habits of successful reporters -- Getting out and about -- News editors -- Non-obvious sources -- Other productive areas -- Stories that good reporters avoid -- 5. Research: What you should be looking for -- Where to get it -- Researching online -- Printed sources -- Research as a foreign correspondent -- 6. Handling sources, not them handling you: Guidelines for dealing with any source -- Official sources -- Handling unauthorized sources -- Unattributable sources 'off the record' -- Getting too close to sources -- 7. Questioning: How to approach people -- The most useful questions in journalism -- Questioning uneasy sources -- Questioning elusive, evasive and hostile sources -- Questioning by email -- Press conferences -- Celebrity interviews -- 8. Reporting numbers and statistics: Questioning data -- The uses and abuses of statistics -- Averages -- Distribution -- Percentages -- Per head -- Surveys -- Opinion polls -- Correlation -- Projections -- Real versus apparent rise -- Probability -- Phoney science -- 9. Investigative reporting: What is investigative reporting? Productive areas to investigate -- Investigative reporting skills -- How to run investigative operations -- 10. How to cover major incidents: How to make sure your coverage of a disaster doesn't turn into one -- Death tolls -- The death call -- All reporters are tough, aren't they?

11. Mistakes, corrections and hoaxes: Mistakes -- How should you respond to mistakes? Great newspaper hoaxes -- 12. Ethics: General guidelines -- Grey areas -- 13. Writing for newspapers: Planning -- Clarity -- Fresh language -- Honesty -- Precision -- Suitability -- Efficiency -- Fluency -- Revision -- The joys of writing -- 14. Intros: How to write sharp intros -- Hard news approach -- Other approaches -- A word about feature intros -- 15. Construction and description: Construction guidelines -- Analyzing story structures -- Payoffs -- Attribution -- Description -- 16. Handling quotes: When do you use quotes? Accuracy -- Efficiency -- Attributing quotes -- Inventing quotes -- 17. Different ways to tell a story: Different approaches -- 18. Comment, intentional and otherwise: Comment in news stories -- The big I -- Analysis -- Obituaries -- Leaders or editorial opinion pieces -- Columnists -- Reviews -- 19. How to be a great reporter: Hard work -- The application of intelligence -- Intellectual courage -- Meticulousness -- Consuming appetite for books -- A good knowledge of journalism's past -- Obsessive nature -- Reading for journalists.