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Journalism used to be a profession where you had to hunt a story down. Real detective work, or at least a phone call was needed to get a story off the ground. Although now, with the internet, anyone can find those quirky, edgy stories that papers are full of. Let’s have a look at how.

What goes into Newspapers? Current Affairs, Politics, Crime, Celebrity and if you’re well posh, business. If you’re a journalist sitting there at your desk on a Monday morning with copy to write, where can you actually go to find the information that you need to write an article?

Contrary to popular belief many of the stories you read in the papers are copy and pasted from PR packs. Here’s the launch of X at location Y and the product does this, this and this. And that filters through to what ends up in your magazine or papers as some well written story about some new electric car or new lithium battery.

Occasionally you may find an article about nature or science. This normally involves a journalist reading the latest National Geographic or New Scientist. Mainstream journalism is all about going on expeditions through the fringes of normality to find yourself a story off the beaten track that you reword and call your own.

So what about those police stories? How are they so up to date? How do they manage to fit in about 10 crime articles a day? Well again, not that hard. It’s funny that people love to read stories about violent crime. Always have and always will. Well as a journalist all the crime info you could ever want is only one click away at the Metropolitan Police’s website here . In this case the police are doing the job for you. It’s also why all those crime stories you read are very similar.

Although what about other news. Say it’s a really slow week and the papers needs to put in one of those gory stories about some cannibal eating someone in Germany. Or a woman being dragged behind a train. Then there’s a site for that too. Daily Rotten is a site devoted to dark news stories, collated from around the world. Check it out here .

So there you have it. Get a PR company to send you their press packs and find someone willing to watch BBC Parliament all day and you have all that you need to create your own paper.