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What is the methodology of journalism of household transaction for a month

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The journalistic method: Five principles for blending analysis and narrative

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The intersection of knowledge and narrative, of informed journalism, is the heart of what the Journalist’s Resource project continues to explore. In the short essay below, Nicholas Lemann, a professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia Journalism School and a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, articulates a method for journalism that integrates knowledge while preserving the art of storytelling. We reprint it here with his permission:

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A central problem in the practice of journalism is that most of the time, we are trying to engage in narrative and analysis at the same time. They don’t naturally go together. Journalists more often unwittingly let the narrative distort the analysis than vice versa. What follows is an attempt at a journalistic version of the scientific method, aimed at protecting us from writing stories that are factually accurate and narratively compelling, but still fail to capture the truth of a situation.

Awareness. On any complicated subject, beware, when you set out, of overly simple conceptions of what ‘the story’ is. Often these involve your having unwittingly accepted somebody else’s frame of reference, or having been primed to see the story in a certain way, or having mistaken correlation for causation, or having succumbed to some other form of embedded misperception. As a first step, you should always stop and ask yourself what you have bought into before you have begun.
Forming a hypothesis. It’s healthier to admit to yourself that you have one than to go into a story with the idea that you have no presuppositions at all – that would be impossible. You should state a working hypothesis (to yourself, anyway), and then ask yourself what would prove the hypothesis false and what would be an alternate hypothesis to explain whatever it is you are investigating