Finding that missing jar of marbles

Brigid Schulte of The Washington Post found a different take on the recession: people selling burial plots.

“A friend sent me an e-mail clip of a story of people selling all sorts of things from a Las Vegas paper, including cemetery plots, to make ends meet in the recession, and I began to wonder if things had gotten that bad around here,” Brigid says.

Today’s Tip: Fresh ideas for covering an ongoing story, such as the recession, can be found in unlikely places -- if you’re paying attention.

Brigid started with classified ads and worked her way to online cemetery-plot sellers, she says. Her big challenge was getting plot sellers to talk.

“There was a lot of shame. I was shocked when Debbie Jenkins told me flat out that she was living in an unheated garage and had already lost so much she figured she couldn't lose any more by talking to me,” she says.

Brigid says finding fresh angles on stories starts by just paying attention.
“I once got one of my favorite stories -- of a $10,000 reward offered for a lost jar of marbles that turned out to be a saga of lost love and betrayal -- by reading a bulletin board in an ice cream shop,” she says.