Ask anyone what skills you need to become a journalist, and it's likely they will include curiosity alongside aptitudes such as news writing, interviewing and working with data.
But being curious doesn't always save you from the occasional lack of inspiration and writer's block.
As Sally Herships, a contributing reporter at Marketplace, explains in this post for NPR Training, curiosity can help you find stories in unexpected places or mundane conversations, and keeping a 'shopping list' of ideas on your phone that you can come back to later can be helpful.
But for when curiosity doesn't take you anywhere, Herships advises harnessing the internet's power by posting call outs on social media and digging deeper into the topic at hand through research, as it's possible you will uncover something more than what you were originally looking into.
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