As I started working on my book about old Florida hotels, I realized pretty quickly that I was going to need two important (and obvious) things: research and organization. 

It’s obvious because those are elements all good reporting requires. My realization was that I needed both on a whole new level to make sense of hundreds of properties, some with conflicting historical records. 

I went back to a workshop I built a few years ago for early-career journalists and remembered this process:

First — Search. (Google, then get past Google. Try old newspaper clippings, diaries, community bulletins, meeting minutes and historical societies.) 

The trick, Roy Peter Clark writes in “Help! For Writers,” is to keep researching until information starts to repeat itself.

“Such repetition is a good thing,” he says. “It will strengthen your evidence and serve as a signal that it’s time to move to the next stage.”

In my old hotels book, this process helped me figure out what would and would not make the cut. The hotels needed three things: They had to open as hotels, still be open as hotels, and be 50 years old or older. 

Next — Understand. What’s at stake? Who’s involved? Whose voices have been left out? What’s this story really about? 

By the time I got to this phase, with a very colorful spreadsheet, I realized I was approaching the project all wrong. I needed to organize my book into decades, not regions. It was about when, not where. A ’50s hotel in Miami had more in common with a ’50s hotel in Warm Mineral Springs than it did with the palatial hotel that opened in the early 1900s and sat just down the road. Seeing this shaped the whole project. 

Finally — Discover. Questions I ask in this phase include: What do I still need to know, and what’s fascinating? Around this time, I stumbled across a few online caches of old postcards from the places I was writing about. And I remembered the stories hotel owners told me again and again about the old postcards from their properties that visitors mailed off decades ago, which eventually were rediscovered by a family member and, instead of being thrown into the trash, were sent back to the hotel. 

I realized those tiny works of art helped shape an entire tourism industry, were a very early form of social media and a brilliant form of marketing.

It took me years, but the process worked for me. What research tricks do you have? 

Today at noon, I’m excited to learn many more tricks from this free webinar. It features longtime researcher Caryn Baird and PolitiFact staff writer Loreben Tuquero. Next week, I’ll sum up some of what they share. You can tune in here! 

While you’re here:

• From Liam Scott, read The National Trust for Local News seeks stability after months of turbulence.

• Coming in September, sign up for this free webinar on covering mental health equity from Poynter’s Mental Health Reporting Project. 

• Sign up for a brand new Substack from Bill Mitchell called How True: Stories and Strategies of Nailing Stuff Down.  

• From my colleague Jon Greenberg, here’s an essential timeline for covering upcoming cuts from the big and recently passed Republican bill. 

• And inspired by our workshop for nonfiction books, we’ve created a brand new virtual workshop for people who are ready to write their memoirs!

   

That’s it for me. My oldest gets his senior pictures this week and my youngest got some new clothes for her freshman year and how is summer almost over already?!

🥲

Kristen