How to prepare a report or write an article you've been assigned to do.

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 …

…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.