Think back to the last crime story you read in a paper or saw on the news.

Perhaps you remember the details of the crime or the mugshot photo staring back at you.

But have you ever stopped to wonder where those stories come from?

How did they get from A to B and reach the reader or viewer?

I'm Maitlandigan. This is the tip-off. My name's Sarah and I'm a journalist.

Like many journalists, Sarah Turnage started her career working at local papers.

I'm from Essex originally, and I did my NCTJ with a very small kind of weekly outlet as it was then called the Thurik Independent,

a weekly newspaper solely focusing on the Thuric area.

And then I went to the Echo, which is the larger kind of daily newspaper in the Basildon, South End area in Essex.

And it's a paper I grew up with, so that was like kind of daily output of news.

And then I moved in 2018 to Bristol, where I still live, and worked for the Bristol Post.

Life in a local newsroom is busy.

With reduced budgets and fewer journalists, reporters are relied upon to file story after story.

Especially when you're working on the daily print title, you're constantly aware of this deadline.

It depends what newsroom you're in, but usually it's like 7, 8, 9 o'clock that you're really working towards.

So you've got to get stories in the paper.

If you're writing three, four or more stories every day, you have to

move fast. You can leave you little time to really interrogate things. Many journalists find

themselves relying on press releases. The local police force was often a source of juicy

stories, things that readers would be interested in.

You'd get an email, press release through, and then quite often you'd look at that and you think,

great, that feels a spot on the site, that feels a spot in the paper.

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