Research. The first thing you should do when you've been assigned to prepare a report or write an article is research the topic in much the same way as you've researched topics for essays or reports. On my first day as a reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press I was assigned to interview the Winnipeg singer Ed Evanko. I had never heard of him so I checked the newspaper's archives for articles. I took such …showed first 75 words of 580 total…

…showed last 75 words of 580 total…why it was said or why it happened. If you want to determine the most important social, economic or political developments in Canada, you need to track them over time. I once wrote a 10-part weekly series on every province. Even with a length of one page, the information in each article had to be carefully distilled from a mass of background material. I focussed on those topics most often discussed in each province's newspapers.