The Weekbook
The primary purpose of weekbooks is as a practical way of communicating with editors and colleagues about the stories you are pursuing. The secondary purpose is to give the city desk budget lines to insert into the daily budget in an efficient manner.
Keep a running list of enterprise stories at the bottom of your weekbook, which may be carried over week to week.
A really good practice: add a line called FOLO to your daily budget lines after you finish your daily. The FOLO line should include such things as what you see as the folo-up story, unanswered questions, unreached sources, issues that could be turned into weekenders, people from dailies you want to profile, etc. The FOLO line can help you and the desk to know where a story is going, strengthen your beat reporting performance, and serve as an easy
way to file a better weekbook with good story selection.
Evening meetings. Decide well ahead of time by studying agendas and talking to sources whether a meeting will produce a story. If you decide it won’t, don’t go. If it will, then you should decide either a) to file a story, even short, that night for the next day’s edition and follow up next
day with a second day story, if necessary; or b) if you cannot file that night, do a walkup/preview on the news issue to run the same day of the evening meeting. Then follow up the day after the meeting, if necessary (result, new development, conflict, etc.). This best practice requires a
little additonal forethought; it won’t hurt.
- compiled from the Best Practices column by Jonathan Maslow, Herald News
Here’s a template to use in creating your weekbook.