By Tom Hill, Course Director and Founder, Up To Speed Journalism.

Tip #13 Become A Detective

In the latest in this series of blogs on the skills that will serve you well as a reporter, I urge you to become a detective.

Mist shrouded the dark surface of the river and stabbed at my lungs as I turned off the towpath and came face to face with a man toting a submachine gun.

I knew straight away that I was onto a story. The men I had discovered on my early morning jog were counter-terrorist police investigating an IRA bomb attack. I arrived on the scene as they were digging up some semtex high explosives in an allotment.

A year later I sat at the press bench in an imposing court room at the Old Bailey as a judge sentenced three men to 35, 25 and 10 years respectively for the bombing of the Warrington Gas Works.

I had stumbled across a story by chance, and as a reporter I was able to follow it to its conclusion in the courts. Luck had played a part in finding the story, but it was the sort of thing that happened to me quite often when I was a reporter.

You will find stories when you are looking for them obsessively and when you are using your eyes, your ears and your contacts in the hunt for clues in the same way that a good detective should.

When you are covering a small town, always looking for stories about it, its name will leap out at you from any piece of text, no matter how small the font. That’s how, as someone who can’t speak a word of German, I once came back from a holiday in Switzerland with a front-page lead for my local paper. I gave the Swiss newspaper no more than a cursory glance, but spotted the words “Colwyn Bay” buried in the German prose. A friend translated the rest for me and I had a Welsh angle on a Zurich murder, a crime story we hadn’t picked up on back in North Wales.

Sometimes, real detectives can become a little irritated by the “armchair detective” theories of crime reporters. I remember a friend of mine having one of his theories about a fatal arson attack shot down at a police conference in the morning, only to find the woman he had suspected, confessing her crime to him in the afternoon.

However, detective instincts should not merely be reserved for crime stories. Fascinating historical features can be unearthed if you are prepared to follow a trail of clues through the dusty records at your local archives, and readers often appeal for help from reporters when trying to track down long-lost friends, relations and even pets.

Seven years after Victorian explorer David Livingstone went missing while trying to find the source of the River Nile, the New York Herald sent a reporter, who originally came from North Wales, to track him down.

In November, 1871, after eight long, hard months that reporter, Henry Morgan Stanley, was able to start his interview with the immortal question, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?”

Stanley had grown up in a grim Welsh workhouse before joining the merchant navy. As a teenager he jumped ship in New Orleans, and was to serve on both sides in the American Civil War, before finding an outlet for his adventurous spirit, dogged determination and detective instincts in journalism.

There will always be room in journalism for people who can apply their initiative, drive and can-do approach to a problem and come back with the story against all odds.