Keeping Busy Covering a Beat
By Tony Rogers, About.com Guide
Once you've finished college and perhaps worked on a weekly or small daily paper, the next step up would be a job at a medium-sized daily, one with a circulation of anywhere from 50,000 to 150,000. Such papers are typically found in smaller cities around the country. Reporting at a medium-sized daily is different from working at a weekly or small daily in several ways.
Covering a Beat
Very small papers have very small staffs, so the journalists who work there tend to do a bit of everything. Reporters may cover the cops, courts and city hall all at the same time, while also taking pictures and maybe even laying out the paper.
But medium-sized papers have larger staffs, and so the tasks become more specialized. Reporters tend to work specific beats, or areas of coverage. This allows those reporters to build up a certain amount of expertise as they get the know the beat over time. Typical beats include the police, courts, local schools, business and city hall.
The larger staff size also means that reporters usually just report and write. Photography and layout are left to those who are better trained in those skills.
A Typical Day
A beat reporter often starts her day by checking in with the sources on her beat. For instance, a police reporter might start her day at the police precinct, seeing what interesting crimes have happened overnight and talking to the cops to see what else is going on.
Likewise, a court reporter might check the docket of cases being heard in the courthouse that day to see which ones might be interesting to cover.
Once the reporter knows what stories she plans to cover that day, she checks in with her editor to let him know. The editor may approve her assignment choices or have something else he wants her to work on.
After that the reporter gets started on her stories. In the days before newspapers had websites, story deadlines for morning papers were often in the late afternoon or early evening, meaning a reporter might have most of a day to report and write an article.
But with most papers now having websites, newspaper reporters must produce online stories earlier in the day. So our police reporter might bang out an early version of her story for her paper's website, then write a longer, more in-depth version later on for the paper's print version.
Breaking News
If a big news story suddenly breaks, all the planning for the day goes out the window. Big breaking news - such as a plane crash, a tornado or a shooting, for example - take top priority. Everything else is set aside when a big story erupts.
A Balance of Hard-News and Features
Medium-sized dailies have lots of reporters covering everything from politics to the arts to the sports beat. But even hard-news reporters typically must produce a mix of hard-news deadline stories and longer features.
Let's return to our police reporter. Her week starts with the production of lots of relatively deadline-news stories. But by late in the week she may be asked to produce a longer feature for the Sunday paper (Sunday papers are the biggest of the week and are often filled with long, in-depth stories.) So she might write a profile of a local police officer, or do a story about the rise in illegal drug use in a particular community.
The point is, reporters today must be able to produce both deadline news stories and longer features, no matter what beat they cover. And they must be able to write quickly, because the paper's website always needs new content.
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