Hold it as a hypothesis, however half-baked it is, but hold it lightly.

From How To Write Something Much Better Than a Hot Take by Susannah Roberts.  I am excerpting much of her piece so I don't lose the ideas, but the original is worth visiting for the recommended exercises as well.  

Say you've gotten an idea for a thinkpiece. You've seen something on Twitter or read something in WaPo. It's made you Mad and given you a Big Idea about What's Wrong With the World. Probably it's the fault of Disembodiment or Disenchantment. It's certainly traceable to the Lack of Thick Community and is probably traceable to Nominalism. 

Sample: Young people aren't going on dates any more.  William of Ockham's intellectual errors explain why.

Here’s what you should do. Write down your hot take, briefly, and then put it aside. Demote it from Pitch or Take to Topic. It is not yet a Pitch. And your Take may be correct, but you don’t know that yet. Hold it as a hypothesis, however half-baked it is, but hold it lightly. 

And then ask yourself these questions. Write in response to them: names, phone numbers, addresses, and notes, paragraphs, other questions. These questions will not finish your piece for you. But, when you write in response to them, they will generate the ingredients that you will need to write something that is actual magazine journalism and has the chance to be good.

1.  Where is anything related to this physically happening? Can I go there?

2.  How can I test my hypothesis? If I were wrong, how would I know?

3.  What have some people who are wiser than me and who disagree with me and with each other said about this topic?

4.  Who has expertise in this topic?

5.  Who can I talk to who has been doing something practical related to this topic for more than three years?

6.  What scenes - as in a play - would illustrate this topic?

7.  What in my life makes me care about this topic? 

8.  What is the most vivid personal anecdote that you can tell that would explain that?

9.  If I don’t have a vivid personal anecdote about this topic, who would? What is their anecdote?

10.  What secrets related to this topic can I find out?

11.  What statistics related to this topic can I track down?

12.  What institutions related to this topic exist and how can I get involved with them? (infiltration, interview, business records)

13.  Who has written about something related to this topic 50 years ago? 100? 500? 2300?

14.  What fiction or poetry has been written about this topic?

15.  What are counterexamples to the problem this stood out to me about this topic? 

16.  What else is going on that might be a confounding factor: what affects this topic?

17.  Who can I talk to who has experienced the dire consequences of this topic, or other aspects of this topic, firsthand?

18.  What community can I visit where this topic is being suffered or countered? Who are the key people in that community?

19.  What adventure or caper can I go on to explore this topic?

20.  What historical parallels to this topic are there? Who are those people and what are those stories? 

21.  What are the Golden Nugget quotes from interviews or other texts related to this topic that I almost certainly will want to include?

22.  Finally, for a Plough [Roberts' magazine] piece: How can what I have uncovered in this investigation help readers to live as though another life were possible?

Great structure and also a good precursor variant of the types of questions which go into good decision-making.  In the context of decision-making I would especially focus on 2 and 11, and broaden 11 to "measures and statistics."  

In this age of baseless opinions and press release journalism (rewriting of advocacy press releases), you can see the gulf between what is offered as journalism and what actual journalism looks like.

You can reverse engineer any major article in the NYT, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and quickly get a sense of just how many steps were omitted.  

Which sort of makes sense.  What Roberts is recommending is a lot of work.  Any glib person can dash off an empty piece which reads well but says nothing, effects nothing, changes nothing.  Executing all twenty-two steps is a lot of work, a lot of man-hours, a lot of elapsed time to get to a quality output.  It just doesn't easily fit the economic model of most modern newspaper and magazines.  

Regrettably.