Mike McCardell has spent his life tracking down thousands upon thousands of stories, from the uplifting to the sobering, from the bizarre to the sublime. As the author of many books and a lifelong reporter, he has stored up a vast collection of anecdotes and is never short of a tale to tell.

With None of This Was Planned, McCardell takes us behind the scenes to show the sometimes agonizing, sometimes accidental, always reaffirming experience of hunting down a good story with the clock ticking toward air time.

Between the frantic race to find stories against...